There's a word for the thing that kills more products than bad code, bad timing or bad luck. It's solutioneering and the reason it's so dangerous is that it feels exactly like good work while you're doing it.
Hilde Franzsen, Brand and Marketing Director at Inkblot, a Stellenbosch creative agency working across brand strategy, UI/UX and product design, introduced the term at the start of her masterclass on product decision-making. It comes from product designer D. Keith Robinson, who defined a solutioneer as someone who jumps to a solution without understanding the problem it's made to solve.
Here’s how to be sure you’re building the right thing before you start.
The problem isn't the solution, it's the order
Solutioneering isn't about building bad things. It's about building things in the wrong sequence, starting with a technology, a feature or what you assume users want, and then working backwards to justify it.
"AI has made it cheaper, easier and faster to commit. In product development today, you can go from a vague idea to a deployed product in a single afternoon. You can generate a polished interface from a text prompt, build an interactive prototype in minutes and produce something that looks finished and good before a single user has touched it. That is incredible, but it's also the most dangerous thing happening in product development right now."
How to be sure you build the right thing before you start
1. Check whether you're using technology words or user words
The first signal is in how you describe what you're building. Solutioneers describe products in technology terms. Founders who understand the problem describe it in user terms.
"We're building an AI-powered insights dashboard" is a technology description. Nobody wakes up at 3 am thinking they need an AI-powered insights dashboard. They wake up thinking they have no idea which of their revenue streams is about to dry up. That's the user word version, and it's the one that actually maps to a real problem worth solving.
2. Check where your last feature idea started
There are two ways a feature idea can begin. It can start with something a user is struggling with, "our users keep abandoning the onboarding flow at step three" or it can start with a solution looking for a home: "what if we added a progress bar?"
The second version isn't always wrong, but it's the pattern that accumulates into a product full of features nobody uses. Hilde's self-check is direct: did your most recent feature idea start with "what if we added..." or with "users are struggling with..."? The starting point tells you almost everything about whether the idea has roots.
3. Look at how Snapchat lost $1.3 billion in a day
In 2018, Snapchat redesigned its app to mix friends' stories with content from brands and celebrities in a single feed. The team thought it would feel more personalised. They were wrong.
More than 1.2 million people signed a petition demanding the old design back. Kylie Jenner tweeted that she'd stopped opening the app. That single tweet wiped $1.3 billion off Snap's market cap overnight.
5. Name the problem before you touch the solution
The way out of solutioneering is one step, done consistently: Name the user problem, specifically, in user language, before any build decision gets made.
"UX isn't about making things look right. It is about designing the right thing before you design it well. A beautiful product that solves the wrong problem is just an expensive decoration."
Why this works in South Africa
SA founders are mostly building with lean teams, short runways and no room for the kind of iterative waste that better-capitalised markets can absorb. Solutioneering is expensive anywhere. In SA, it can end a company.
There's also a specific AI trap in the local context. With powerful no-code and AI tools now accessible to any SA founder, the barrier to building has collapsed. That's a genuine advantage, but it means the discipline of asking "should we build this?" before "can we build this?" matters more than ever. The answer to the second question is almost always yes these days. The first question is the one that saves you.
Want the full playbook?
This post comes from Hilde Franzsen's Founder Collab masterclass, From Solutioneering to UX: How to Prioritise Designing the Right Things. The full session covers:
Writing a value hypothesis before you build anything.
Finding and protecting your Core Value Action.
Turning feature ideas into testable UX hypotheses instead of opinions.
Running cheap, five-person tests that save you months of wasted engineering.
The Founder Collab has 40+ masterclasses from SA's best operators across sales, UX, fundraising, paid media, automations, and more. Join The Founder Collab to access the full session.
