Are you solving the wrong problem, the right way?

Back in 2015, Satyajeet Salgar - the ex-Chief of Staff at YouTube - gave a talk on product management during one of our Toppr Friday sessions. His exposition on product management at YouTube made it evident to us that we had a lot of scope to improve.

One of the key points from that talk has remained with me till date. For Satyajeet, the most important role of a Product Leader is to ‘identify the right problem to solve’. Product Managers working with the leader can then work on finding and executing a solution.

Since then, I have always asked myself, “Is this the right problem to solve right now?”.

Here are two cases from Toppr’s garden of forking paths where we set about to discover the right problem to solve.

Case 1: The impossible project

This goes back to the year Toppr started. The platform we were designing for the K-12 market required 40,000 unique questions in order to truly be adaptive. As we approached teachers to help us build our question bank, we realized that the market was paying an average of Rs. 200 per question.

The best players in this market had built less then 10,000 questions over many years. Our goal seemed impossible in the face of reality.

Here was our assumed problem: Finding a large set of teachers to build the question bank and also find the funds to pay for it.

And so we sat and contemplated our options:
1. Search for teachers willing to work at a lower cost.
2. Change our platform to one that doesn’t need as many questions.

Changing our platform would take away all the benefits from students and it was unfair to expect teachers to work at a lower rate. I haven’t added the third point - folding up - because it was never an option for us.

But we realized we were solving the wrong problem.

Here was the true problem: How can we create a bank of 40,000 questions in under 3 months at just Rs. 50 per question.

We spent the next three months to solve both these fundamental problems. You can read about them in this post by Rohitashwa Choudhary.

Case 2: In-demand and not too

We really did not plan to introduce video lectures on Toppr.

We were focused on building and enhancing a practice-based platform with high user engagement. Around the time Satyajeet visited us, a few technological advancements were happening.

Internet speeds were improving, streaming was becoming mainstream and students wanted video content. As a result, they started requesting video lectures.

And so, we collaborated with the top teachers in the industry. With their help, we launched video lectures on Toppr. Students loved them and wrote really encouraging reviews about the quality of content.

The sales team were selling video lectures like hot cakes! However, the Product team found something a bit off. Video lectures didn’t see the same traction as the practice section on our platform. This was counter-intuitive.

We wondered, “Wasn’t watching video lectures easier than racking your brains while solving a question? After all, watching videos is a passive consumption”.

We realized we had implemented a solution without identifying the real problem.

Video lectures were a solution to an underlying, unsaid and misunderstood problem. What was this problem? Was it affecting their learning? What made them ask for video lectures?

If you’re keen to know, stay tuned for our next blog post, where we discuss the video lecture streaming habits of students.

Want to take a guess? Let us know in the comments!

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