The solution only comes in after the pains have been surfaced, grounded, and prioritized. Rushing to pick a pain is exactly the mistake this stage exists to catch.
This became very clear to me while preparing for a product sense interview stage. The stated goal of the stage is to understand how the candidate thinks about positioning, market segmentation, and users. The script follows a deliberate order: look from different angles, surface user pains, resist the urge to pick one too fast, ground the pains, prioritize which ones are bigger or easier to solve, and only at the end, list several possible solutions.
The real point is the sequence. The natural temptation, in an interview or in real work, is to fixate on the first pain that sounds interesting and rush to a solution. The script inverts that impulse in three moves:
- Widen. Multiple pains, multiple angles.
- Ground. Why this pain matters, for whom, and how intensely.
- Prioritize with explicit criteria, weighing the size of the pain against how easy it is to solve.
Only then does the solution space open up, and still in the plural: list several possible solutions, rather than defending the first pet idea.
Worth turning the mirror on when evaluating candidates too: whoever pitches a solution in the first sentence is showing exactly the behavior this stage was designed to filter out.