Addressing Pains and Gains: Why You Can't Solve Everything and Shouldn’t Try
You’re eager to help, and after a lively group brainstorm, your whiteboard is jammed with every frustration—big and small—your friends, clients, or family have mentioned. Someone hates early alarms; another wishes for more color in PowerPoints; someone else feels stuck in endless queues. Your energy spikes as you imagine solutions for each and every problem. But as the weeks grind on, you realize you’ve made little progress. In trying to address everything, you end up solving nothing particularly well.
One afternoon, your phone buzzes: a teammate texts ‘Can we pick just one or two things and do them right for once?’ The suggestion stings, but you can't deny the pattern. So you gather the group again. This time, with some reluctance, everyone votes to rank pains and gains. The top pain is 'always waiting for responses,' while the most essential gain is 'feeling heard and included.' Now, the team focuses only on these two.
With that focus, solutions get sharper. Instead of chasing fancy fixes or broad efforts, you create a quick, effective communication tool and a habit of daily check-ins. The difference is instant and visible: meetings speed up, morale ticks upward, and energy returns.
This mirrors an essential behavioral design truth: we can’t be all things to all people. High-performing teams and products succeed because they win dramatically on the things that count. The payoff for focused, depth-over-breadth work is real change where it matters most.
Gather your full list of customer or stakeholder pains and gains, making sure each is clear and specific. Then, challenge yourself (and your team, if you have one) to rank them—let the most pressing rise to the top. Now pick the most important pain and the most essential gain. Laser-focus your creativity and resources there. Build features or improvements that address these with unmatched quality, and let others fall aside. You’ll see progress faster, and your solution will stand out for what matters.
What You'll Achieve
Internally, you’ll experience less overwhelm and more strategic clarity; externally, the solutions you create will be sharper, more valuable, and more likely to spark real improvement for those you serve.
Prioritize Only What Matters Most to Your Customer
Gather all pains and gains from your customer research.
Take the full list and ensure each one is specific, concrete, not vague or generic.
Rank pains by severity and gains by essentialness.
Order each list so the most severe pains and most essential gains rise to the top, based on customer feedback.
Choose to solve only a few, but solve them extremely well.
Commit to addressing the most critical pains and delivering the gains that matter most; let go of trying to fix everything else.
Design pain relievers and gain creators that are radically focused.
Build features or services that deliver clear, targeted results on the selected items. Avoid broad fixes that dilute your impact.
Reflection Questions
- Am I spreading myself or my project too thin by solving everything?
- What would improve most if I solved just one pain or enabled one gain extremely well?
- How can I identify which issues matter most to my audience?
- What projects could I postpone or delegate now to maximize focus?
Personalization Tips
- A teacher picks two major classroom complaints to solve this semester instead of trying to fix everyone's minor gripes.
- A fitness coach designs programs that only address the biggest barriers to working out—like time and motivation—not every wishlist item.
- A family revamps their morning routine to fix the most stressful bottleneck, rather than worrying about minor inconveniences.
Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want
Ready to Take Action?
Get the Mentorist app and turn insights like these into daily habits.