Understanding business pain points

Whether your role is a Product Manager or a Business Analyst, the role requires the person to have a full understanding of the user’s problems or pain points, before they can propose the right solution (product).

Understanding business pain points

There are 3 key levels of analysis that can help us fully understand a problem:

1. The Business-Level: Discuss with the business and the operations team to understand about their current business and operations process flow and what are they trying to achieve and why (business goals). Create a business / operations process flow diagram (a visual model).

Important: If the user reference a solution as a pain point, ask them why they need that solution. Keep up this process until you get to the root cause of their pain points.

2. The Engineering-Level: Discuss with the engineering or system support team to understand the engineering components that relates to the business workflows.

3. The Information-Level: Discuss with the business and the data team to understand the current state of how and what data and information are stored, maintained, data modeling techniques and what are they trying to achieve next and why.

Once we understand the current state, we can:

1. Identify multiple possible solutions.
2. Prioritize potential solutions.
3. Make a decision.