A structured workshop where senior decision-makers move from a messy, complex challenge to a clear, agreed Problem Statement — grounded in customer reality and business priorities. The foundation for everything that follows.
We all fall in love with our ideas. So we skip the hard part — defining the problem.
Teams jump to solutions while stakeholders are still describing the challenge in different ways. Designers build for one customer, engineers for another. Leadership pushes a direction nobody fully questioned.
The result: meetings that produce more questions than decisions. Roadmaps that change every quarter. Six months later, the work is done — and the problem is still there.
Problem Framing stops that sequence before it starts.
Problem Framing is built for moments when the stakes are too high to move forward on assumptions.
The challenge is real, but different stakeholders describe it differently — and no one has been willing to call that out
Leadership buy-in is needed before a decision can move forward, but alignment hasn't happened
The team keeps circling symptoms without landing on a root cause
A decision needs to be made but every meeting ends with more questions than answers
The team surfaces internal realities — what's broken, what's been tried, what's actually working — alongside external forces: market shifts, competitor moves, changing customer behaviour. Information is unevenly distributed across organisations. This phase gets everyone on the same page.
The team aligns around four questions: what they want to achieve, how success gets measured, what's limiting them, and what the cost of inaction looks like. Stakeholders leave with a shared definition of what winning looks like.
Stakeholders engage directly with the customer experience — working with real data, voting on pains and gains, and asking the harder question: who does the customer need to become?
Everything converges into a prioritised shortlist of well-defined Problem Statements. The team prioritises based on two things: how painful the problem is for the customer, and how much it matters to the business.
By the end of the day, the team has a clear, agreed Problem Statement and the shared understanding of why it matters. Not a room that nodded. A team that built the reasoning together — grounded in customer reality and business priorities — and is ready to act on it.
Your team brings the challenge and the domain knowledge. DSA handles everything before the room — stakeholder mapping, discovery interviews, customer research synthesis, persona and journey map preparation. Then facilitates the full day, making sure the right people are heard, assumptions get surfaced, and the session ends with a real decision
One day of facilitation, preceded by 1-2 weeks of preparation. On-site.
A one-day training for up to 15 people. Your team learns the full Problem Framing methodology and leaves with everything needed to run sessions independently — the Playbook, Facilitation Slides, Agendas, and Facilitation Toolkit.
For teams who need a repeatable way to align senior stakeholders on complex challenges without bringing in external support every time
One day. Up to 15 participants. In-person at your organisation.
For individuals on your team who want to go deep on the methodology at their own pace. Six hours of step-by-step training, two ready-to-run workshop formats, 200+ facilitation slides, and live coaching calls with John and Dana. Everything needed to run Problem Framing sessions independently — without waiting for an internal cohort.
Self-paced. Lifetime access. Available at problem-framing.com.
How Problem Framing works in practice
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