You can describe your symptoms to a doctor, but you don’t get to diagnose yourself straight into a procedure or surgery. They step back, run tests, and confirm what’s actually going on. Skipping that is malpractice. Plumbers and home repair people take the same diagnostic step first.
A problem is something you can reproduce and describe clearly.
Not “our data is messy.”
More like “we can’t identify non-member event attendees who come to more than 1 event a year.”
Problems show up in two forms.
Bugs: something is broken.
“Submitting this contribution page with Stripe throws an error when the profile includes this custom field.”
Improvements: something could work better to save time/money or user satisfaction.
“We can’t segment first-time donors and do easy follow up within 7 days.”
Then ask one more question: is it worth fixing?
What changes if it gets solved? More donations? By how much?
If you can’t define the value or measure the impact, it’s probably not a priority. It’s just wishful thinking without prioritization.
Here’s the deal:
Diagnosis first, measure the benefit, then decide if it’s worth fixing.
Problem identification is at least half the battle. It gives you focus. Especially important now, when tech can do so much and the real constraint is deciding what’s worth doing.
If you made it that far, next step is isolating the problem quickly and safely.