Product Managers, Level Up Your Problem-Solving Skills

Teresa Torres argues that product managers are essentially designers who solve ill-structured problems, which have no single right answer and several competing solutions. Drawing on educational psychologist David Jonassen's research, she contends that PMs often mistakenly treat these problems like well-structured ones, relying on rigid prioritization formulas. Instead, she proposes treating product work as a design process: framing the problem, exploring multiple perspectives, grounding those perspectives in evidence, and synthesizing a shared understanding before seeking solutions. The approach matters because disagreements usually stem from misaligned problem representations, and a richer problem space yields better solutions.

01Key takeaways

• Treat product challenges as ill-structured problems with several valid solutions, not as puzzles with one right answer.
• Spend more time framing the problem before jumping to solutions, since different framings produce different solutions.
• Map your own specific recent experiences first, capturing goals, motivations, thoughts, and feelings.
• Have teammates create individual maps without group conformity, and listen with curiosity rather than critique.
• Use affinity mapping on customer research data to build a shared, evidence-backed understanding of the challenge.
• Keep the problem map a living document and validate it with evaluative research before exploring solutions.

02Key sections

Product Managers Are Problem Solvers

Torres frames product management as a form of design, meaning problem solving rather than only aesthetics. She cites Jonassen's distinction between well-structured problems with known answers and ill-structured problems with multiple tradeoffs.

How Not to Solve Product Problems

She warns against applying formulaic feature-scoring spreadsheets to ill-structured business challenges. Treating messy problems as if they had fixed rules leads to false confidence in poor decisions.

Explore the Problem Space

Because each person represents the problem differently, teams disagree without resolution. Torres recommends mapping out multiple perspectives, starting with one's own, to expand the problem space and open more solutions.

Map Experiences, Then Immerse in Customer Perspectives

She describes mapping specific personal experiences, then having teammates map theirs independently, then grounding everything in real customer research. Customer observation should follow self-reflection so personal assumptions don't bias the findings.

Synthesize, Align, and Test

Teams use affinity mapping on raw research data to converge on a shared perspective, make it explicit as a visual map, and then validate it with evaluative research, revising it as a living document.

03From the post

“I’ve never met a product manager who doesn’t want to get better at what they do. The challenge is not in the desire, but in putting that desire into action. Product management isn’t a well-defined function. It’s changed rapidly over the past two decades. Most”

04Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.