I used to think value was built into the product. It isn't.

There is a tendency to treat the solution as the most valuable part of the process: the product, the campaign, the new website, the strategy, the idea that finally makes everything click. The more I work across technology, data and marketing, the more I notice that the quality of the solution is often determined long before the solution exists.

It starts with a problem.

Not the problem as it appears in a brief or the problem someone happens to mention in a meeting, but the underlying problem that is actually worth solving.

A business might say it needs more leads. A team might ask for a new website. A company might want to launch a new product. Those requests sound specific, but they don't necessarily tell you what is actually wrong. More leads might not be a lead-generation problem at all. It could be a positioning problem, a targeting problem, a trust problem or a product that isn't creating enough value for the people it is reaching. A new website might not need to be a website problem either. The business might simply have lost clarity about what it offers and who it is for.

The requested solution and the real problem aren't always the same thing.

I came across a line from Dan Roam that captured this better than anything else I'd read:

“Whoever best describes the problem is the one most likely to solve it.”

Dan Roam

What stayed with me wasn't simply the idea of defining a problem more carefully. It was what that definition implies about value.

A business exists to create something that another person considers valuable enough to exchange something for. That something can take many forms. It can be a physical product, a service, a subscription, access to a shared resource, a resale opportunity, a lease, an agency relationship or something entirely new. The form matters, but it isn't the value itself.

The value is what the customer gets from it.

That distinction is easy to overlook because businesses naturally think about what they produce. A company builds software, so it talks about software. A hotel provides rooms, so it talks about rooms. A restaurant serves food, so it talks about food. A marketing agency produces campaigns, so it talks about campaigns.

But customers aren't necessarily buying any of those things in isolation.

A hotel room might be what is being sold, but the customer could be buying rest, privacy, convenience, security, a sense of escape or simply the feeling that everything has been taken care of. A piece of software might be the product, but the customer may actually be buying time saved, fewer mistakes, better decisions or complexity removed. A restaurant sells food, but people can be buying an experience, an occasion, atmosphere, connection or the feeling of being somewhere worth remembering.

The product is only one part of the exchange.

People don't just buy what a business makes. They buy what that thing does for them.

That is what makes value creation so interesting to me. Value isn't entirely contained within the product or service itself. It exists in the relationship between what a business offers and what someone is trying to achieve.

And that means the same product can create completely different value for different people.

A feature that is essential to one customer can be irrelevant to another. A service that feels expensive to one person can feel effortless and worthwhile to someone else. A subscription only makes sense if the ongoing value is greater than the cost of continuing it. A shared resource works because access solves a problem that ownership doesn't need to. Even a simple resale model creates value by making something desirable, useful or difficult to access available to someone who wants it.

The mechanism changes. The underlying question doesn't.

Why would someone choose this?

That question is more difficult than it sounds.

It forces you to look beyond what a business wants to sell and towards what the customer actually wants to experience. It also forces you to recognise that value isn't something you can simply declare. A business can describe itself as innovative, convenient, premium or customer-focused, but those words only matter if the customer experiences them as true.

This is where experience becomes part of value creation.

Two companies can sell essentially the same thing and create completely different experiences. One can make the process confusing, slow and impersonal. The other can make it feel effortless. The underlying product may be similar, but the perceived value isn't.

The experience surrounding the product becomes part of the product.

That is why I increasingly see branding, marketing, product and customer experience as much closer to one another than they are often treated. The way something looks, the way it is explained, the way it is purchased, the way it works and the way the customer feels afterwards all contribute to the value being created.

A beautiful brand cannot compensate for a terrible experience.

A technically sophisticated product cannot compensate for solving something people don't care about.

And a great campaign cannot create lasting demand for something that doesn't deliver meaningful value once someone buys it.

This is also why I found the idea of testing and feedback particularly important. You can think you understand a problem. You can build what appears to be an excellent solution. You can launch it with confidence.

Then someone uses it and tells you something you didn't see coming.

That isn't necessarily failure. It is information.

A prototype can be valuable precisely because it is incomplete. It gives people something concrete to react to. A conversation can reveal an objection that wasn't visible in the original research. A sales call can expose a need that customers weren't expressing directly. A campaign can show that the audience you expected to care isn't the audience responding. Data can reveal a pattern, while customer feedback can help explain what sits behind it.

The process becomes a loop: define, create, observe, learn, refine.

The more you learn, the better you can describe the problem. The better you describe the problem, the more precisely you can create the value that addresses it.

That way of thinking has changed how I look at marketing too.

Marketing is often positioned as the function that communicates something once the important decisions have already been made. The product exists. The service exists. The business model exists. Marketing's job is then to tell people about it.

But if marketing starts that late, something important has already been missed.

The person responsible for communicating a product needs to understand what problem it solves, who experiences that problem, what they value, what alternatives they already have and why this particular solution deserves their attention.

Otherwise, marketing becomes an exercise in describing features.

And features aren't the same thing as value.

This is particularly important in technology, where complexity can easily become mistaken for sophistication. A product can have impressive architecture, advanced AI or an enormous list of capabilities, but none of that automatically explains why a customer should care. The interesting work is translating what something is into what it means for the person using it.

What does it make possible?

What does it remove?

What does it improve?

What does it make easier?

What experience does it create that didn't exist before?

Those are much more useful questions than simply asking how many features something has.

I think this is also why the best business ideas aren't necessarily the most original ones. Sometimes value comes from doing something familiar in a way that removes friction, creates a better experience or serves a need that existing alternatives have overlooked.

The innovation isn't always in inventing something nobody has seen before.

Sometimes it is in understanding something that already exists better than everyone else.

And that brings me back to the original quote.

Whoever best describes the problem is the one most likely to solve it.

The more I think about it, the less I see this as a statement about problem-solving alone. It is really a statement about value.

Before you build the product, you need to understand the problem.

Before you define the proposition, you need to understand the value.

Before you market the solution, you need to understand the experience you're asking someone to buy into.

And before you decide what to create, you need to understand why someone would want it to exist in the first place.

Because the strongest businesses aren't simply good at producing things.

They are good at recognising what is worth producing.

And perhaps that is the part of value creation that interests me most: not finding a clever answer to a question, but becoming precise enough about the question that the right answer becomes possible.

Originally published on LinkedIn.