Fall In Love with the Problem, Not the Solution offers mentorship in a book, and aims to empower you to build a successful business by identifying your consumers’ biggest problems and disrupting the inefficient markets that currently serve them. My advice to you: Find another chief executive, someone you can confide with to provide you with another perspective. Then act. A:I am so glad you asked this question – it is THE fundamental way of thinking that differentiates social entrepreneurs from the traditional charitable approach. (BTW – we have a step-by-step, social entrepreneurship process called Social Alchemythat dives deeper into this concept.) I approached the CEO and shared my thoughts. The Telmap platform seemed an ideal one to carry out my vision.

It can be detrimental to ignore what others are telling you. Maybe your friends, potential business partners, or investors had something important to say and you didn’t listen! But, at the same time, you must be in love to go on this journey. It will be a long, complex, and difficult roller-coaster ride. If you’re not in love, it will be too hard for you. All of them knew within the first month. There was one guy who knew before he even started. The problem was not that the team wasn’t right. The problem was that the CEO did not make hard decisions. Making hard decisions is hard, and this is why making the hard decisions usually goes all the way to the top of an organization. But there is more to it. “The problem was that the CEO did not make hard decisions.” Perhaps more importantly, the emphasis on problem definition prevents development workers from exploring two other, and in our mind, equally legitimate strategies for problem solving, namely: co-evolution and solution mapping. So what is the issue with the problem definition default? In our experience, there are at least three:They had partially, obliquely “solved” (ex post) the women empowerment problem - or at least pointed to a potential solution - without ever defining it (ex ante) or in fact using the phrase. In fact, neither of them set out to solve women empowerment issues in the first place. Fall in love with the problem, not your solution.” It’s a maxim that I first heard spoken a few years ago by USAID’s former Chief Innovation Officer Ann Mei Chang. I’ve found myself frequently reflecting on those words as I’ve been thinking about the challenges of implementing public policy. I spent the past year on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. working as a legislative fellow, funded through a grant to bring scientists to improve evidence-based policymaking within the federal government. I spent much of the year trying to better understand how legislation and oversight work together in context of policy and politics. To learn what makes good public policy, I wanted to understand how to better implement it. Needless to say, I took a course in Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA), a framework to manage risk in complex policy challenges by embracing experimentation and “learning through doing.” I am an entrepreneur and also a mentor and teacher. Committed to spreading entrepreneurial thinking, it was only natural for me, after building two unicorns – Waze and Moovit – to take the next step and write “Fall In Love with the Problem – Not the Solution, a Handbook for Entrepreneurs”. There are many ideas that you think up, and eventually there is one that you tell yourself, this is the one. This is like going on many dates and eventually meeting someone and telling yourself, she’s the one. At the beginning, you only want to spend time with your date. You don’t care about the rest of the world. Similarly, you only want to spend time with your new idea and your new concept. You think about it from multiple perspectives. You think about it from the problem that you’re going to solve and the people that actually have this problem, and this is how the solution is going to look and this is what will do tomorrow morning and this is my end game and so forth, until you feel confident to tell your friends, this is what I’m going to build. If the job is adequately getting done, that’s bad news for you because it’s hard to displace an existing solution with a similar-sounding value proposition. If, on the other hand, you find the job isn’t getting done “well enough,” that’s great news for you. The obstacles or problems getting in the way of the customer achieving their desired outcome are where you’ll find space for innovation.

Firing is a hard decision. Hiring is an easy decision. When hiring new people, mark your calendar 30 days down the road and ask yourself: Knowing what I know today, would I hire this guy again? If the answer is yes 30 days in, then tell that person that you are pleased with their performance so far. If the answer is no, fire that person immediately because from this point on, everyone already knows that this person shouldn’t be there. If you don’t fire that person, this is the beginning of the end of your organization. Think of all the services that you use every day: searching Google, using WhatsApp, opening Waze, Uber, Netflix. Ask yourself: What is the difference between using any of those things today compared to the first time I used it? There is no difference. We are searching Google today the same way that we searched Google for the first time. We are using Uber today the same way, and we are using Waze today the same way. Transparency in data brokering laws ensure that everyone knows and understands what personal data they are sharing using mobile apps and other digital technologies. At the beginning, you spend time only with that idea. This is when you think of the problem, the users, the solution, the business model—everything. Just like you only want to spend time with your new loved one as you begin falling in love. So, how do we overcome our counterproductive tendency to fixate on a specific solution? The Lean Startup Methodology provides a structured process to help us focus on the problem, and through experimentation, find the best solution. A 3-step decision framework for falling in love with the problem Step 1: Define the problemSecond, social entrepreneurs believe that the best solutions are bottom up – they bring those we serve into the solution.In your case, you have two customers – employers AND employees. What jobs do the people in your area want? What would get them to a living wage? What are the high vacancy jobs that employers cannot fill? Where is the best nexus between job demand and job supply?

Ehud and Amir were working together at a software house that Amir was running. Ehud was the Chief Technology Officer (CTO), but in his “night job” he had built a product called FreeMap Israel. The book is easy to read and describes all aspects of building a product, or service, from how to define the problem that worth solving, fundraising, hiring and firing, startup rollercoaster journey, product market fit (PMF) and to growth and to the end of a startup (the exit). Assume that there is someone on a team that shouldn’t be there because they don’t fit. This is a small startup company, maybe 20 or 30 people. Everyone knows when there is a person who doesn’t fit. When the CEO doesn’t do anything, that’s where the problem arises. 5. Firing and hiring is the be-all and end-all. An awesome organization would be a company that is exceptional, impressive, and inspiring, with great DNA. It will be admired for its achievements, reputation, culture, and values. One that, among other things, retains top talent.

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by Uri Levine and was extremely impressed. As the co-founder of Waze, Levine brings a wealth of entrepreneurial experience to the table and shares valuable insights in this book on how to embrace the challenges and problems that inevitably arise in business. Below, Uri shares 5 key insights from his new book, Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution: A Handbook for Entrepreneurs. Listen to the audio version—read by Uri himself—in the Next Big Idea App. https://cdn.nextbigideaclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/06110156/BB_Uri-Levine_MIX.mp3 1. An entrepreneurship journey is exactly like falling in love. One of the things that stood out to me about this book was Levine's emphasis on the importance of customer experience. He argues that by falling in love with the problem and working tirelessly to solve it, businesses can not only improve the customer experience, but also drive innovation and growth. Levine provides numerous examples from his own experiences at Waze and other companies to illustrate his points.

One way marketers can become more adaptable—and avoid falling in love with solutions—is to adopt agile practices that are better suited to the nature of work today, says Jon Smart, partner and leader of business agility, Deloitte UK. “Organized human endeavor has fundamentally changed from mass production to knowledge work,” he says. “In the digital age, being agile is critical—because the work is emergent, and the pace of change is faster.” Both organisations were homegrown and, arguably, more sustainable in the long term than donor-driven initiatives. The book make you re-think of your decisions and actions as an entrepreneur or a business leader. It helps you clearly define the problem that worth fall in love with, it encourages you to keep going to that goal, and gives you the tools to do so. A better way to prioritize your customer feature requests is by first understanding the root problem that triggered the request in the first place. Where were they? What were they trying to do? Why? It goes beyond saving time—it's about empowering individuals to manage their lives more efficiently.It is of course very difficult to argue against problem definition. Analytical thinking is what most development practitioners - and business managers - have been traditionally trained on. The underlying belief is that when once you thoroughly explore the problem space (often through a desk exercise), the solution presents itself. And, let’s face it, starting with “I might not know what the solution is to this particularly challenging societal issue” is not exactly a successful strategy when pitching for donor funding. Let’s fast forward to a launched product with many customers. With lots of customers come lots of new feature requests. Who do you listen to?