Summary: Why jumping to solutions is holding your team back…And what to do instead. UX and Service Designers must help stakeholders address this fundamental weakness in their ability to gain from UX efforts. ‘Solutioning’ is the Achilles heel (weakest spot) of engineering and product teams.

Jumping to Solutions?

One of the most persistent challenges in UX and service design isn’t a lack of creativity, collaboration, or tooling. It’s the impulse to jump straight to solutions. Not just designers but our stakeholders (devs, BA’s, product managers, senior leaders). Technically minded people are ‘hard-wired’ to chase solutions and fire them out quickly, often without allowing whole-problem thinking.

If you don’t do it as a designer, your stakeholders surely do. It’s the norm: Does this sound familiar?

• Product managers want just-in-time features: “This will help users”.
• Engineers want to ship or fix something quickly: “MVP, easiest and fastest”.
• Leaders want certainty and forward motion: “We’ll fix it (add the UX/UI) later”.

But rushing to solve can derail even the most well-intentioned efforts. It bypasses contextual understanding of tasks, goals and lived experience. It disrupts any chance of rethinking via empathy and locks teams into high-risk decisions.

Solutioning is a reflex, not a strategy

This “solution reflex” shows up in phrases like:

• “Let’s just redesign the interface. We know it’s broken, we don’t need more research”

• “Why don’t we automate that step? Users will only benefit from this streamlining”

• “We need to roll out a new feature. Let’s define it and then validate it– if we have time”

These responses often arise before the team has spent time with the actual problem. What appears to be a usability issue might be a trust issue. What seems like a quick fix might reinforce a broken system. When we skip over inquiry, we solve symptoms, not systems.

Sit with the problem, even when it’s uncomfortable

Real insight starts by staying with the discomfort of not knowing.

This is why TED talk founder Richard Saul Wurman likes to say confusion is your friend in UX. Contrast this with solutioning, which likes to punch confusion head-on in the face. Rescue it and make it go away.

Honestly, pausing before solutioning is the most valuable skill stakeholders can learn. Or that you can teach them. I am assuming designers already have this bad habit in check- if you don’t join my UX Inner Circle for mentoring and support.

When I was teaching Capital One (a US bank) teams UX techniques monthly over a two-year period (earning a 5-star rating in their Digital College), the head of UI Design told me this was the biggest organisational challenge. So, we spent a lot of time focusing on how to facilitate conversations without “solutioning”.

The skill here is what in service design, we sometimes call holding the problem space.

This means resisting the urge to immediately explore an assumed solution or path a user will take. The goal is to fully make the problem space visible. Problem space refers to all the conditional influences governing user problem-solving, decision-making or sense-making.

Hint: The way users make sense of or solve problems is often not how you think. Their decisions are often burdened with other forces, like social interactions with others (see Why  sociability should be default in UX definitions).

“Fall in love with the Problem” is not a delay tactic, but a path to a better UX strategy, more task-goal context alignment, and better design differentiation.

It means listening—not just to users—but noticing and exploring contexts, relationships, histories, emotions and more.

Instead of asking “What do users need from this form or feature?” we start to ask:

• What pressures surround the use of this service?

• What assumptions does the system make about the person?

• What are we not seeing because of our framing?

What to do instead

1. Use Zoom In / Zoom Out to shift perspective

Stakeholders (devs, BA’s, product managers, senior leaders) often get stuck in a single altitude. We’re either too close to the pixels or too far into the strategy. Instead, practice zooming in and out deliberately:

• Zoom In: (Feature view) Look closely at a single interaction. Where does confusion arise? How do users describe their confusion in the moment?

• Zoom Out: (Journey view) Step back to see the wider systemic forces (including a triple ecosystem view). What social, organisational, or policy forces shape this interaction?

Zooming in and out can help conversational pivots with stakeholders.

2. Practice better problem-framing

One antidote to premature solutioning is disciplined problem-framing. Strong problem frames keep the team curious longer. Instead of asking “How do we fix X?”, ask:

• Are we solving the right problem? What is the right problem from the user’s point of view? How does that change for eg people with disabilities?

• What patterns do we notice in user workarounds?

• What tensions are surfacing between policy and practice?

• What expectations are people bringing into this journey?

• Where are people getting lost—not just literally, but emotionally or socially? How does that get impact for neurodiverse users?

Invite your team to hold multiple perspectives. Instead of a linear problem statement, map a landscape of tensions, contradictions, and lived experiences. This is what it means to work in complex systems. It’s also why I consider Problem Framing essential to UX & Service Design.

3. Encourage problem sensing in every role

The ability to sit with ambiguity, listen deeply, and delay the impulse to fix isn’t just a UX skill. It’s a leadership skill. It’s a systems thinking skill. And it’s one that can—and should—be practised by everyone:

• Engineers can ask: “What is this feature trying to make easier, and for whom?”

• Product managers can ask: “What don’t we understand about the context yet?”

• Stakeholders can ask: “Are we solving the right thing, or just the visible thing?”

When teams become better problem-sensors, they become better problem-solvers. Commit your team to a group-wide “Problem First, then Solution” approach. Get posters up: “Fall in love with the Problem first”. IKEA employs this approach on their meeting room doors to shape the meeting culture.

Bottom line

UX and Service design are not about shipping faster or quick solutioning. That’s the sad cultural baggage of start-up culture. Great UX comes from spending time in the problem space. That’s where speed in the solution space is realised.

The real work begins in the not-knowing—the messy, emotional, systemic space where human needs, institutional inertia, and competing truths collide.

The most powerful thing we can do is pause before we sprint.
To listen longer.
To sense the whole. Chase the systems view, not the parts.
To name what is actually happening, before trying to fix it.

And when we do, our solutions stop being reactive. They become responsive.

 ↗️ Learn how to Pause and Respond to Empathy in this FREE masterclass.. Rethinking Empathy (June 6th)- recording available with membership if you don’t catch it live.