During long time I thought that software products have built from idea, but the reality is opposite - software products are consequences from problems which them are solving. That's why to find "a good idea" need to find "a good problem" which can be solved with a product idea.

There are several ways to find a good problem for software products:

• To think about problems which I have or I can see.

• Note all found problems and choose some from the noted list.

• Research the Upwork website for already published problems in the job form.

Of course, this is not full list of sources where somebody can find problems to solve, but I found it the best for myself. There is also a good sources of problems, like Twitter or Reddit, but I didn't used them in the scope of my course.

After finding the problem, you need to validate it before brainstorming ideas for its solutions. Validation is crucial because it helps you understand if the problem is worth solving by building a software product around it. There is a framework that helps to validate the problem - HWWW. Basically, you need to answer the following questions:

• How big a problem is this?

• Why does this problem exist?.

• Why is nobody solving it?

• Who faces this problem?

To answer the questions above, you can Google them or use ChatGPT to get a brief overview of the problem.

After answering the questions from the previous section, you will have a brief overview of whether the problem exists or not. However, before jumping into solving it, you need to understand if the market is big enough for your product. The technique that helps to answer this question is named TAM-SAM-SOM:

• TAM (Total Addressable Market) - The total market for your product.

• SAM (Serviceable Available Market) - The portion of the market you can acquire based on your business model.

• SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market) - The percentage of SAM you can realistically capture.

Providing such details will give you an overview of whether the market is big enough for the problem you want to solve. To find answers to these questions, you can use Google or ChatGPT.

After identifying the size of the market, we can jump into the competitor analysis to understand if a new product can compete with existing ones. I'm using Google and ChatGPT to identify competitors with these key features:

• Competitor name

• Revenue

• User Base

• Website/Mobile App

• Effectiveness of the problem solving

• Main Feature

• Pros

• Cons

• Ownership

• Public Status

• Business Model (Prices)

• Price Packages

• Demographics

These features provide a brief overview of the competition and a small understanding of whether the problem is worth solving. If there are no competitors, it may mean that the problem is not significant enough to solve, or it's a key problem to address. 😉

After identifying competitors, I choose the top 3 biggest ones and provide a SWOT analysis for them to better understand how they work. SWOT analysis is a technique for answering these questions:

• S (Strengths) - Internal attributes that are helpful to achieving the objective.

• W (Weaknesses) - Internal attributes that are harmful to achieving the objective.

• O (Opportunities) - External factors that the organization can exploit to its advantage.

• T (Threats) - External factors that could cause trouble for the organization.

With SWOT analysis, Market Size, and Problem Definition, I can safely determine if I should brainstorm ideas for the identified problem. Idea generation is the next step, where you think of ways to solve the defined problem, which I will not highlight in this article.

In the scope of my Product Management course, I analyzed a couple of problems, and the process, as you can see from the article, is pretty standard. That's why I decided to develop GPT, which will help to validate product problems - Product Idea Analyzer, which is free to use.

My GPT automates all the steps described in this article: from the initial problem validation to the final competitors SWOT analysis. All you need to do is send the problem to the GPT and answer its questions.

This GPT is available through the Product Idea Analyzer link and is free to use.

I used Google Docs to describe problems in the scope of the product management course and created a template to simplify work on new problems. The Google Docs template is available at theProduct Template link.

In this article, I described my experience of problem identification, which I learned from the Product Management course. I also want to highlight that after learning these things, I understood that problem definition is more important than idea generation. If you understand the problem well, you can generate a lot of ideas. However, if you start with idea generation, you don't know what you want to solve or where you want to be in the future.

The next step after identifying the problem is the idea brainstorming process, during which you should think about different solutions to the problem. It doesn't have a framework like problem identification, but idea brainstorming has never been an issue for me — problem definition was.