Great Tech Products Don’t Solve Problems—They Do So Much More

Product teams in the tech industry are focused on shipping products with various bells and whistles without any concern as to whether it actually does anything measurable for the customer’s business.

I can certainly attest to this as an AI engineer, everybody wants a chatbot all of sudden.

But why? How does a chatbot add revenue or reduce costs?

I would even go as far as to say it could hurt both.

Automated phone bots have already frustrated end users for years — every person reading this has had the experience of repeatedly pressing “0” or saying “representative” until we can talk to a live person.

I’m at the point of my career where I’ve realized that great technology does not solve problems. It never has.

It has to do so much more.

Technology Doesn’t Solve—It Enables

Look at the Wright Brothers and the first flight.

Did their plane solve the “problem” of humans not being able to fly?

Nobody prior to 1903 ever had the following conversation:

“Hey Joe, what seems to be bothering you?”

“(Looking up at the sky) Well, Bill…I’m trying to get to New York, and I just can’t seem to flap my arms hard enough to get there!”

It’s a ridiculous premise, but that is what we get when we look at technology as a solving problems.

Technology has never solved a problem. Ever.

Technology enables us to do things that never even occurred to us as possible.

It gives us a new ability—it doesn’t fix an old one.

That is why creating and shipping technology products is so hard — you have to reimagine the human experience of something entirely…

To borrow from Disney, you have to become an imagineer.

Great technology gives us a new ability—it doesn’t fix an old one.

Every time a good technology product has come along, it shifted a paradigm and changed the way we did something entirely.

• The airplane changed the way we travel — it didn’t solve the problem of humans not having feathers and wings.
• Social media platforms changed the way we maintain relationships — it didn’t solve a problem with the Rolodex.
• ChatGPT changed the way people search for answers — it did not solve the problem of search engines not being conversational.

Technology allows us to perceive the world in a different way. It changes our paradigm and how we think about the world.

Let’s look at an example of how great technologies change how we think.

Q: Let’s go back to 1900 — if I asked you to calculate the time it would take for you to arrive in New York City from some random city in America, what would you have done?

A: You probably would’ve pulled out a map, figured out what trains you’d need to catch and the scheduled arrival date of each train to come up with an answer.

Q:Fast forward to today — if I asked you to do the same thing, what would you do?

A: You’d go online and check flights from your nearest airport and maybe factor in the time for the Uber rides as well.

You wouldn’t calculate the time to get to New York City as the crow flies.

That is because your paradigm for travel is limited by the technology you have available to you—you perceive the world relative to your limitations of perceiving it.

You currently do not have the paradigm of personal air travel enabled to you, such as a jet pack or a flying car.

Therefore, your paradigm for travel planning comes down to airports and Ubers.

You perceive the world relative to your limitations of perceiving it.

When you look at technology as an enabler and mechanism for shifting paradigms instead of solving problems, you begin to see it for what it truly is.

Great technology products give you a new reality—they don’t band-aid your current one.