How Solution Definition Goes Wrong in Both Directions — And How to Fix It
Here's a paradox that shows up repeatedly in new product and business strategy development: solution definitions that are simultaneously too little and too much.
Too little — because the scope stops at the core product boundary. The core product is defined carefully, but everything else a customer needs to succeed with it — onboarding, integration with adjacent tools and systems, support, the partner and complementer capabilities that make the product usable in a real-world context — gets assumed, deferred, or left for someone else to figure out. The customer experiences the gaps. The team wonders why adoption is slower than the product quality seems to warrant.
Too much — because the team is trying to win on every dimension, optimizing performance across every requirement, building everything to a high standard regardless of whether customers particularly value it or competing alternatives fall short on it. The instinct is understandable. Nobody wants to ship something that's weak in any area. But the practical result is investment spread too thin, and differentiation that's indistinguishable from noise.
Both problems have the same underlying cause: solution definition that isn't grounded in what the market actually requires and what competing alternatives actually deliver. The new Solution Definition tool in the Growth Forge® Software platform is designed to address both — at the same time.
The "Too Little" Problem: Scope That Stops at the Product Edge
Customers don't buy a core product. They buy a solution to a problem — and they experience that solution across their entire journey, from the moment they evaluate alternatives through initial commitment, setup, active use, and eventually expansion or exit. Every phase of that journey has requirements. Gaps at any phase create friction, increase churn risk, or create openings for competing alternatives that cover the journey more completely.
This is what Growth Forge means by the "whole solution" — the complete set of capabilities required for customers to accomplish their job across the full customer journey and product lifecycle. That includes what the organization delivers directly, and it includes what value network partners, complementers, and service providers contribute. Both matter. Customers don't care about the organizational boundary between the two.
The Solution Definition tool is structured around this full scope. It captures solution elements to address jobs to be done and requirements across the complete customer journey — not just the core product usage — and explicitly includes contributions from value network actors. The output is a whole solution map that reveals where coverage is strong, where assumptions are being made about what partners will provide, and where genuine gaps exist that the strategy needs to address.
For teams that have done thorough jobs-to-be-done research and requirements definition, this scope check often surfaces something: the market-facing requirements that didn't fit neatly into the core product definition, and that quietly became "someone else's problem." The tool makes those visible before they become a customer experience problem.
The "Too Much" Problem: Trying to Win on Everything
The second failure mode is subtler, but just as costly. When solution definition isn't connected to a structured understanding of which requirements drive adoption and where competing alternatives fall short, the natural response to "what should the solution do?" is: everything, as well as possible.
That's not a strategy. Competitive differentiation requires choices — specific capabilities and performance levels where your solution meaningfully exceeds both the threshold required to motivate adoption and what competing alternatives deliver on requirements customers most value. Resources concentrated there create advantage. Resources spread across every requirement, including ones that customers consider adequately addressed by current alternatives, create cost without differentiation.
The Solution Definition tool connects directly to the prioritized requirements developed in the Requirements tool — requirements ranked by how important they are to target customers and how satisfied those customers are with how current alternatives address them. Each solution element is analyzed against those requirements: which elements have the highest impact on the requirements that matter most? What performance level does each element need to achieve to be competitive — and what level would create genuine differentiation?
Those performance targets become the standard against which the updated Competitive Analysis tool evaluates your solution alongside competing alternatives. The result is a requirements-grounded picture of where you're differentiated on dimensions that actually drive decisions — and where you're investing in performance that the market won't reward.
Together, that analysis gives teams a principled basis for making the scope and investment trade-offs that solution definition always requires — not as judgment calls made in isolation, but as strategy choices grounded in market evidence.
What This Unlocks
The outputs of Solution Definition don't just inform the solution itself. They drive the next steps in the strategy workflow.
The performance targets established here carry forward into the Competitive Analysis — turning a qualitative competitive map into a requirements-grounded evaluation of genuine differentiation. They carry forward into Implementation Planning, where the question becomes: for each solution element, should we build it internally, source it from a supplier, or partner with a value network actor — and what are the risks of each approach, particularly for the elements that matter most?
Defining the solution well makes every downstream step of the strategy more rigorous. And it starts with getting the scope right — not too much, not too little.
Ready to explore the full release? Request a demo or log in to your Growth Forge account to see everything that's new. Questions? Reach out to us here.
Growth Forge® is BRI Associates' enterprise strategy development and portfolio management platform for innovation leaders and their teams.
