Another fairly useful framework for anyone involved in product discovery is the 5 Why’s. As discussed in Defining Product Management, product discovery is all about determining what features should be prioritized and built to best deliver on customer and business outcomes. One major challenge with the discovery process is that customers and prospects do not always understand and clearly communicate their own problems. They may communicate only the symptoms of a certain problem or envision a solution that does not actually solve the underlying problem. This framework is meant to address these challenges.

The 5 Why’s framework is a simple interviewing method that attempts to peel back the layers of the problem. The interviewer simply continues asking why the customer is behaving in a certain way until a fundamental problem or insight is revealed. This typically takes several rounds of diving deeper into customer responses and behavior, with the “5” noted in the framework name being somewhat arbitrary.

For example, let’s say you work for a live event ticket marketplace and are exploring why some users place tickets in their cart but do not complete the checkout process. In a user interview, the user starts off talking about how the seats are only held for five minutes before they time out and are released back into the marketplace. Instead of accepting this answer and moving on, you then ask the user why they need more time to checkout and whether there are any other activities they are squeezing into this time frame. The user then reveals they often check two different marketplaces to confirm they have the best available tickets at the desired price point. After you again ask for additional context, the user mentions that there was a concert 14 months ago where they had purchased a ticket but then immediately found a better deal on another site but could not reverse the initial purchase. You continue to probe and confirm you have revealed a core insight for this user. 

If you had stopped at or heavily focused on the user’s first response, you may have come to the conclusion that the tickets are not held long enough for this user to successfully check out. This may have led you down the path of increasing this length of time, which likely would not have had a meaningful impact on the checkout conversion rate (assuming for simplicity that this user is representative). This user’s more fundamental problem is that they lack trust that the marketplace offers the best inventory and prices relative to competitors. This is a much different insight and problem to be solved than indicated by the initial response from the user. 

The 5 Why’s framework helps us push past surface level symptoms in pursuit of deeper insights about customer problems and behaviors. It is certainly not a flawless approach, however. The main drawback of this method is that as you continue to ask why, the scope of the discussion tends to narrow. If a user offers up a response that is not germane or not truly reflective of their behavior, then this approach can lead down a rabbit hole of non-useful information. This risk is most easily mitigated by developing a better feel for user research through additional repetitions. 

This is a simple but powerful framework that is not limited in its utility to just product managers and user researchers. Revealing the root causes of customer issues can be very helpful for Customer Success, Sales/Solutions Engineering, and Operations teams, among others. It can even be applied internally to reveal and clarify stakeholder issues and process gaps. The 5 Why’s is a flexible and useful framework that can help reveal fundamental problems in a variety of contexts.