Observations and insights are the output of the customer research. The key difference is that observations are “what I observed” and insights are “why the customer is behaving this way”. Knowing “why” allows you to understand the real motivations driving customer behaviour. Most times, these insights are not immediately obvious and come later. But framing what the problem really is is a vital step – if you get the “unmet need” wrong, then you may be working on the wrong thing for the rest of the initiative.

A good way to begin to formulate the ideas or potential solutions is to use the double- diamond method, which forces the user to start from a potential problem, and repeatedly diverge and subsequently converge to discover the root cause.

Diverge is the answer to the question “What else might the problem or solution be?” Converge is the answer to the question “Which of the options might be most appropriate answer, and why?”

So, in diverge, you don’t knock out any options, but keep trying to expand the repository of possible answers you have. This often reveals the true nature of the problem. If asking why this problem occurs leads to the discovery of yet another unseen problem, then you may have uncovered the root cause, which helps to frame the real problem at hand.

In converge, you start to identify which answers are a better fit for the problem at hand. Most people spend little time thinking through the problem and end up solving the wrong problem. This is actually worse than the right problem with the wrong solution because you can then pivot to the right solution. But when you have the wrong problem to begin with, no amount of pivoting the solution is going to help.