Am I solving the right problem?

You found this through a NAU sticker. The product works. The market yawns. This is often not a quality problem. It is a cosmic-scale mismatch between the problem you solved and the problem anyone was hiring you for.

Teams solve the problem they can build. Buyers hire solutions for the progress they are trying to make. When those diverge, marketing becomes translation for a language nobody speaks, which is exhausting for everyone involved and excellent for competitors.

Wrong frame vs right frame

**Bad:** shipping features because a competitor shipped them. This is how you end up with a Swiss Army knife that also makes toast and still fails at opening a bottle. **Good:** interviewing people about what they tried before you, what they stopped doing after switching, and what they would miss if you disappeared.

Clayton Christensen’s jobs-to-be-done thinking, still useful via Harvard Business Review, asks what progress the customer wants in a circumstance. Not which button they clicked while confused.

A fix you can run in one afternoon

1. Write your current problem statement in one sentence.
2. Ask five customers (or lost prospects) to rewrite it in their words.
3. If their sentences do not match yours, yours is wrong for growth.
4. Rebuild the homepage headline from their sentence, not your roadmap.
5. Cut or freeze any feature that does not serve that rewritten job for 30 days.

More depth: how I decide whether a product is worth building.