Where business, user, and technology intersect. Choosing the right approach.

You can't evaluate what you haven't defined. And you haven't defined it until you can say what success looks like.

This is where problem-shaping comes in. It's the work of looking at a messy real-world situation and carving out something specific enough to build and evaluate.

Problem-shaping sits at the intersection of three types of research:

• Business research — What's valuable? What's the cost of the problem today? What would a solution be worth?
• User research — What's the actual workflow? What are the real inputs and constraints? What does "useful" look like in practice?
• Technology research — What approaches exist? What's possible given the data? What are the trade-offs?

And it answers three questions that must be addressed together:

• What problem are we solving? (problem)
• What should the solution do? (solution)
• How should we build it? (approach)

These questions are not sequential. They inform each other. The right problem definition depends on what's technically feasible. The right technical approach depends on what the user actually needs. They have to be shaped together.

What problem-shaping consists of

1. Understanding what the problem actually is

Users and stakeholders describe problems in their own language, shaped by their experience. "We need AI to help with procurement" is not a problem definition. It's a direction.