One of the most important skills in product management, if not the most, is creative problem-solving with a customer-centric perspective. Many times we navigate the uncertainty to avoid or mitigate a pain point of a customer, without information, or once we have some information we need to find creative ways to solve complex problems with solutions that generate an impact on our customers and achieve our business goals.

Creativity is a skill that should be trained, especially to deal with mental model limitations and cognitive biases, that reduce innovation and the birth of fantastic ideas that can come from disruptive and crazy thoughts. The process of solving a problem using an unusual or creative approach was called Lateral thinking by Edward de Bono.

In 2005, I worked on a Delivery company inside an end-to-end internal product to trace and deliver shipping orders, that dealt with 4 million orders daily. delivery persons had 1 hour to assign orders themself in great stores where network coverage was low and there aren’t smartphones. How do you think we solved this problem? Yes, lateral thinking is the clue. Can you think of what similarities exist between a supermarket and a delivery center? We simulated a bought experience of a supermarket inside the delivery center using barcodes and wireless barcode scanners to allow a very dynamic way to assign orders to the delivery persons. Network coverage was an issue, but having a local file with the assignments as a backup for the process in case of coverage problems was the solution.

Lateral thinking is used in ideation sessions to find new ways to solve complex problems, for instance, how would you reduce the costs of your real estate? First ideas usually are focused on space optimization, but lateral thinking ideas are more focused on reducing space per person, like desk sharing. When you use lateral thinking in your ideation process, you explore a wide range of options, including completely unrelated aspects, an infinity world where find out your less intuitive ideas. And here is where diversity in your life and work experience plays a key role because it allows you to think about how other industries, companies, persons… would solve the problem.

Creative problem-solving is driving products and solutions in most domains like sustainability to find new ways for decreasing the carbon footprint, creation of circular economies using recycled plastic as raw material, new organic waste bins for composting, and an infinite number of examples.

So, keep training your brain, go further, keep thinking out-of-the-box, with curiosity, and don’t limit yourself to the first ideas, keep going and raise your lateral thinking skills to create great solutions to complex problems.