Review of the book «How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Wing Big» by Skott Adams I get these kinds of requests very often andt to become a Product Manager! Can you recommend what to

Introduction

Imagine that in the morning you walk into your favorite coffee shop for your coffee, you get your coffee, take the first sip, and realize you don’t like the taste. The next day, the taste is still off. The barista explains that they changed their coffee supplier, and suddenly you stop going to that coffee shop, switching your loyalty to another one.

Or imagine you commissioned the development of a Learning Management System (LMS) from a contractor who offered a price half that of the market rate. The contractor managed to launch the first version, but for three months, no significant improvements were made. A month-long investigation reveals that the code is written so poorly that further development is extremely difficult, and the contractor simply can’t handle it. You end up hiring an expensive, proven developer who rewrites everything from scratch. In the process, you lose several million rubles and half a year.

In both cases, the problem led to irritation or anger, wasted resources with unsatisfactory results, and ultimately a change in the solution.

Problems are the primary focus of customer development and product value creation in the Russian-speaking product world: find people’s problems through interviews, quantitatively validate that it’s a widespread issue, and then rush to build an MVP. Every accelerator, investment fund, and product creation expert unanimously advises: find your client’s problem and fix it with your product.

It might seem that a problem is very simple—you just take it and fix it. But if you dig deeper beyond intuitive understanding, you’ll find that a problem is a much more complex phenomenon. A deep understanding of the problem enables you to make smarter decisions.

Problem = A solution was hired to do a job, and it screwed up.

Let’s recall the basic thesis about problems from the chapter The Main Thing About Jobs To Be Done:

Problems never exist on their own.

A problem is ALWAYS the result of a specific solution being hired to perform a job, and that solution failing—i.e., delivering results below expectations.

A person hires a solution to do a job, and that solution either doesn’t perform the job at all, or performs it worse than expected: it requires more energy, time, or money, and/or provides less benefit than anticipated.

For example, for the job of “enjoying a great cup of coffee,” a person hired the solution “visiting their favorite coffee shop,” and suddenly that solution no longer satisfies the customer: the coffee no longer tastes good. For the job of “developing an LMS within the required budget, timeline, and with the potential for future expansion,” a contractor was hired. He delivered part of the work, but was unable to carry on with the next phase—“further developing the LMS.” The problems arose with the solutions “the coffee shop that decided to change its bean supplier” and “the incompetent contractor” for the jobs “drinking coffee” and “further developing the LMS.”

What Happens in a Person's Brain and Psyche When a Problem Arises

To understand why a problem is a problem for a client, it’s important to consider what happens with a person—in their psyche and brain—when they perform their jobs using various solutions:

• A person experiences emotions in the context of pursuing important goals, and if a goal is not met, they experience “negative” emotions. In this case, these negative emotions serve as feedback: “an important goal wasn’t achieved, so the strategy needs to change,” and they provide the energy to adjust behavior in order to still reach the goal. The more important the goal, the more intense the emotions. (You’ll read more about emotions in the upcoming chapter How Needs, Jobs, and Emotions are Connected.)
• The brain automatically and largely unconsciously predicts reality—forming expectations regarding how much energy, time, and money will be needed to complete a job with a given solution, what benefits will be received, and how energy-efficient (valuable) that solution will be. Deviations from these expectations are corrected by the brain through dips or spikes relative to the baseline dopamine level.
• When facing a problem, a person typically thinks: "I spent time and money, the task wasn’t completed, now I have to find another way to solve it." But this is largely a rationalization of automatic and unconscious processes.

How the Advanced Jobs To Be Done Methodology Describes a Problem Based on Brain Functioning

• A person has a job.
• They hired a specific solution to do that job.
• The person’s brain automatically predicted the work sequence, costs, and benefits of performing that job.
• The person used the solution, and it either underperformed or completely failed.
• Negative emotions as a signal of an unfulfilled goal: The person feels irritation because the job wasn’t completed; they experience negative emotions such as anger, irritation, disappointment, sadness, pain, disgust, etc. These emotions serve as a feedback signal to avoid using this solution in the future.
• Adjustment of the predictive model through a dopamine dip: The person’s brain experiences a drop in dopamine relative to the baseline level, signaling, “Our prediction that the job would be executed with these costs and benefits has not been confirmed.” This acts as a feedback signal for the brain to relearn not to use this solution in the future.
• The person assesses whether they are satisfied with the result, and if not—whether the original job is important enough that they’re willing to perform extra (compensatory) work. If the job isn’t important, they might abandon it. If it is, they undertake additional work.
• Irritation from the necessity of performing compensatory work: If the job is not executed at all or the expected benefit isn’t delivered, the person is forced to do extra work to still achieve the original goal, even though they don’t want to.
• As a result, the person is less likely to use the original solution for similar jobs in the future, and may not recommend it—or might even actively discourage others from using it.

Why the Client's Problem is a Problem for Business

Negative emotions arising from an important job not being completed, the necessity of performing compensatory work, and the dopamine dip from a prediction error ("I thought the job would be done well, but it turned out poorly") form a powerful feedback signal. This signal leads the brain to relearn that "this is a bad way to achieve goals and satisfy needs." In other words, every time a client encounters problems with a specific solution, they are less likely to hire that solution for this or any other job in the future.

If a client encounters problems with your product, it’s clear that you risk losing them and receiving negative reviews, which can lead to increased costs for acquiring new customers.

Why the Client's Problem is an Opportunity for Business

If you’re fortunate enough to identify a significant problem with the current solution among a sufficiently large number of people—and you know how to fix it—it can be an opportunity to launch your product into the market and capture those clients.

Why?

Imagine a person has an important job [e.g., transferring money to their parents in another country], and all known solutions perform the job with problems or not at all. If you can perform the job without any issues, you’ll generate the highest interest and desire for the person to choose you. No other way of creating value will evoke such interest and willingness for people to work with you as executing the job flawlessly does.

Fixing Problems is Not the Only Way to Create Value

Very often, all other methods of creating value are mistakenly equated with fixing problems. For example, in Sequoia Capital’s guide, The Arc Product-Market Fit Framework, all methods of creating value—whether it’s performing more jobs with one solution, significantly simplifying the work sequence, or other mechanisms that you will learn about in the training or from this book—are labeled as "fixing problems."

This happens because people often don’t realize that:

• Jobs come first.
• Value lies in performing a person’s jobs more energy-efficiently.
• Studying and transforming the work sequence allows you to create value.
• Problems are often confused with jobs.

Students who attend my training often refer to everything as a problem: "I want to fix the problem of ordering house cleaning" or "my product solves the problem of automating marketing."

Ordering house cleaning and automating marketing are jobs. When these jobs are carried out with current solutions in specific segments, problems may arise.

Problems Associated with Other Jobs and Needs

Another common scenario is when a solution successfully performs the job it was hired for, but creates problems in executing other jobs or meeting additional needs.

For example: you hired a moving company that packed and transported your belongings from one city to another, but they ended up dirtying the walls in your home. Or you use Slack for internal communication in your company. Communication happens, but it becomes so overwhelming that you have to introduce rules to ensure people still achieve results rather than getting distracted all day by notifications.

How to Apologize for Your Screw-Ups

If you mess up and a person experiences problems with your solution, the best thing you can do is apologize and deliver the job without any issues.

Offering bonuses or gifts that don’t address the person’s core job will only lead to more irritation.

If a client orders sneaker cleaning from you, you ruin the sneakers and then offer a discount on the next cleaning as compensation—this won’t repair the relationship. The best course of action is to find and buy the client a new pair of sneakers.

If a client orders tomatoes from you, but you fail to deliver them, the best remedy is to actually deliver the tomatoes rather than offering a promo code for the next order.

Problems in Critical Job Sequences

Not every client problem needs to be fixed. Apart from obvious factors—such as the problem occurring rarely and/or not affecting a large number of people, or occurring among non-target segments—there’s another key factor: the problem arises in a critical job sequence.

A critical job sequence is a series of jobs that a person cannot avoid in order to accomplish a higher-level job.

It’s crucial to distinguish problems that occur during the execution of a critical job sequence and prioritize fixing those (all else being equal), because failure to complete a job from a critical sequence is highly likely to result in losing the client.

You’ll learn more about critical job sequences, the work graph, and additional jobs later in this book.

Common Mistakes Made When Fixing Client Problems

One of the biggest pitfalls for product developers is fixing the wrong problem