Product leaders don't start out with the standing to define which problems the team works on — stakeholders typically dictate solutions at first. Teams earn the right to define problems by first delivering on stakeholders' existing requests, but reframed as outcomes rather than taken as literal solution specs.
This creates a progression: teams focus on solution discovery (how to solve a given problem well) before they earn trust to do independent problem discovery (deciding which problems are worth solving). Once that trust exists, new problems the team surfaces during discovery become inputs to the next round of Product Strategy — forming a continuous strategy loop rather than a one-off planning exercise.
This loop is presented as the alternative to annual operating plans (AOP), which fund whole projects upfront instead of funding discovery first.
At Datasite, product earned credibility with the commercial org largely through rigorous customer discovery rather than argument. CRO Todd began as a skeptical observer of the platform rebuild and, over time, became an advocate — eventually calling sales leaders personally to welcome the product team when they went on tour. The shift is attributed less to any pitch from product leadership than to what customers actually said once product started doing visible discovery work in front of sales. See Culture Bank (Trust Reserve for Crises) for the broader trust context this happened inside.
At Palace Hotels, coach Gabby ran a three-part assessment before any formal transformation plan: (1) how you build software (delivery mechanics), (2) how you solve problems (process/discovery), and (3) how you decide which problems to solve (strategy/prioritization). The assessment concluded the org hadn't earned the trust to change problem #3 yet — so the transformation started with #2, deferring changes to problem selection itself. This is the concrete mechanism behind the principle that trust must be earned incrementally rather than claimed all at once. It was preceded by in-person relationship-building — Gabby spent time in Mérida with the team and Anoir's co-leader brothers before assessing anything. See Single Pilot Team as Transformation Proof of Concept for what came next.
Palace Hotels deliberately sequenced its transformation to start with how problems get solved (team topology, delivery flow, data infrastructure) before touching which problems get solved (roadmap/strategy content). This was an explicit judgment call, not a default: the org assessed it hadn't yet earned the credibility to influence problem selection, so it spent its first capital on fixing process and infrastructure and only later leveraged that track record to affect prioritization. This gives Earning the Right to Define Problems a concrete ordering heuristic — earn credibility on execution first, spend it on strategy second — rather than treating the two as happening simultaneously.
Из тем: The Product Operating Model