Thoughts
When we begin to develop a creative strategy, the external inputs that should come together into a synthesized whole are often misaligned. Sometimes leadership articulates these inputs, and they trickle down through the company. Sometimes they emerge bottom-up; customer research often drives them. These customer dynamics often take the form of stories. They include direct quotes and observations from real people. They articulate wants and needs. They shape a strategy grounded in reality. These inputs help to shape the initial problem frames, and by leveraging what people say and do, each constraint is grounded in empathy.
To define this part of your creative strategy, first articulate the inputs that come top-down in a more autocratic fashion.
Imagine that we're beginning to build a creative strategy in an educational software company. We’ve identified problem framing around students. Our overall framing statement began as, An opportunity exists to help students succeed in their journey from high school to college, describing a strategy synthesized from customer visits and from an external view of the market. That statement then evolved to focus on the application process itself and students’ support networks, like guidance counselors and parents. The revised statement is, An opportunity exists to help students apply to college with the support they need to make informed and confident decisions.
Now we’ll write a brief that describes the creative strategy. With the revised framing statement in mind, consider these real-world mandates from various stakeholders.
These are the top-down external influencers. They can be challenging, as they pre-suppose both problems and solutions. One person’s knowledge and experience often form them, so they aren’t necessarily wrong. But because they don’t leave room for customer or user input, creative expression, or constraints development, they also aren’t necessarily right.
Articulate these top-down stakeholder opinions by focusing on quotes from stakeholders. What attributable quotes can you use to present how each team leader feels about the product or features?
“I’m just seeing a ton of momentum in the portfolio space. Increasingly, students need to apply to college with work samples.”—Product marketing lead.
“We really need to consider options related to build, buy, and integrate. I have a contact at a third-party company who is willing to cut us a deal.”—Director of third-party partnerships.
These quotes describe new ways of thinking about the problem, new lenses to apply on an otherwise blank space. They are rarely prescriptive; they don’t tell you what to build. Instead, they add structure to the problem. Articulating them doesn’t commit you to doing these things, but you are starting to map out a sandbox for exploration. Also, the very act of articulating them can build support and consensus. These quotes show that you heard someone and internalized what they had to say.
Next, move on to internally perceived technical constraints. Describe the things that your engineering and technical teams view as limitations on what you can accomplish.
There’s no way to integrate with all third-party college-application systems. We’ll have to pick the market leader and focus on integrating with that.
We don’t have an established way to save rich media, like photos and videos; we have no data store for student-specific content other than grades.
It will take way too long to process video uploads at scale.
Describe external market forces. Paint a picture of the competitive and emergent market landscape without fixating on a single competitive product.
Because of the increasing connection between assessment and evidence-based learning, students are emerging from high school with a portfolio of completed work.
College admissions officers are overwhelmed by the sheer number of applications and need a way to rapidly move through and evaluate them.
Grades are only one of the pieces students use to apply to school. They also leverage their extra-curricular activities, letters of recommendation, and even—for some international students—letters that prove the ability to pay for school.
These ideas are externally focused but synthesized from a variety of sources. To shape these statements, you’ll need a picture of the historic problem landscape. This is called tacit knowledge. By definition, tacit knowledge is difficult to describe (it represents things you know so intimately that you don’t necessarily know you know them). So you’ll need to work to articulate this knowledge in a way the team can understand.
Leverage end-user quotes and behavioral observations. These are some of the most important constraints. Quotes and observations from real people ground further exploration in an empathetic perspective of pain points.
“I don’t really have anything to showcase about the skills I learned in school. I didn’t do any sports; mostly I’m good at video games.”
“I try to help all of the students prepare for school, but the reality is that I have 140 juniors applying to school and close to the same amount who aren’t even looking. I can’t help them all, and I end up helping only the ones that are proactive—the students that need my help the least.”
“We want our son to go to school, but we just can’t afford it. I know there are financial aid packages available, but I don’t know how to apply and we just don’t have time.”
You can see the power of these quotes—they probably made you start thinking of solutions. These quotes come from observing behavior. They often describe the aspirations, hope, dreams, concerns, perceptions, and fears of the people who will benefit most from the products you build. These are the most important guardrails because they shape unexpected constraints, the boundaries that often extend the furthest outside of your comfort zone. And most important, they indicate latent needs—customer needs that lie below the surface, waiting to be fulfilled. This is innovation opportunity, the places where creativity can best drive market disruption.
Reflect on the content of our creative strategy so far.
These items don’t solve the problem. Instead, they identified the shape of the problem.
Let’s return to the phrase, the shape of the problem: It captures how elusive creative problems can be when you first start. A well-defined problem has boundaries you can articulate, creating a clear, crisp shape. An ill-defined problem, on the other hand, lacks boundaries, so its shape is amorphous and fuzzy. As we build the creative strategy, we’re making that fuzzy problem into something more crisp and well defined.
Takeaway: Describe influencers, boundaries, market forces, and customer insights.