Article · About a 10 minute read

Find Better Problems Worth Solving with the Customer Forces Canvas

Ash Maurya · LEANFoundry Free Intermediate

Ash Maurya, author of Running Lean, argues you can always find how a customer solves a job today, and that existing workaround is your evidence. The piece gives you the switching forces (push, pull, inertia, friction) to read whether the pain is urgent enough that someone would actually change and pay. It is a concrete, interview ready way to separate a real painkiller from a vitamin.

• Every job already has an existing alternative (even a spreadsheet or a manual hack); if you cannot find one, the problem may not be real.
• How hard the current workaround is, and what would make someone abandon it, tells you the true urgency and willingness to pay.
• Pull the problem out of the customer's actual recent story rather than asking them to predict future behavior.