Exploring the problem space
“Don’t fall in love with the solution.” Understand the problem deeply before you build anything.
The most expensive mistake in product is falling in love with a solution before you understand the problem. Problem-space thinking means staying in the “what and why” — what users struggle with, why it hurts, who it hurts — before jumping to the “how.” Synloom is deliberately built to keep you there longer.
How Synloom keeps you in the problem space
The feature request that turned out to be the wrong problem
Léo, PM who almost built a filter
The situation. Users kept asking for “more filters on the dashboard.” The easy move is to build filters. Instead, Léo imports the requests as evidence and runs synthesis.
What they do
- 1Synthesis clusters the requests and shows the underlying problem: users cannot find last week’s numbers fast enough.
- 2The Definition agent reframes it as a How-Might-We: “How might we surface the most recent, most relevant data first?”
- 3That reframe opens up solutions filters never would — a smart default view, saved queries, a digest.
The result. Léo solved the actual job (find recent numbers fast) instead of shipping the literal request (more filters). The problem-space detour changed the solution entirely.
The trap
A feature request is a solution in disguise. Treat every request as evidence of a problem, then find the real problem before you decide what to build.