Nice, informative article. I would add one crucial element. After “For whom is it a problem?”, I add “How is it a problem?”. More specifically, what is it keeping from happening that we want to have happen? This then gets to the billion dollar question, “what is it that we really want to have happen?”. I once worked with the head of a business unit who said what he wanted was to grow a new product to $100 million in sales in 2 years. Great! Who wouldn’t want that? The thing is, by framing it that way, he was limiting framing problems and solutions based on what was already known, and that wasn’t going to get him past $50 million. I then asked him to close his eyes and imagine that his goal had already happened. Now, what do you notice? What is the feeling that you notice? After a bit he began to smile (this always happens and tells me we are where we want to be.). What he noticed was a customer of his product doing a happy dance, because the product made the customer more successful. So then we could identify what were the things that were keeping that from happening more often. THOSE were the problems they needed to solve. The biggest difference was that his focus shifted from what would benefit the business to what would benefit the customer, which is actually a huge shift in mindset.