The 5 Whys Framework
Where’s the problem? 🔫
As a Product Manager, you always have to understand your users very well. You have to address their desires and solve a problem in their life that they really care about.
Although this is known to everyone, but still many product managers and even product leaders don’t really understand their users well, or at least their problems.
One very simple reason behind that is — “It’s hard to discover problems”.
To understand problems, you need to do a few things.
- Talk to users and understand them
- Empathise with them and understand their goals
- Find out what istheir current process of doing things
Even after doing all this, you cannot be sure if you have identified a real problem or not. If something is so hard, many would try to avoid it, right?
So, if it’s so hard to find and understand problems, how should we do it?
Well, we use the “5 Whys” framework.
5 Why is a framework that is used to do root cause analysis, find underlying user motivations, problems, and pain points, and eventually understand their decision-making process.
It is an iterative approach to uncovering the root of a problem. It encourages you to dig deeper into surface-level problems in order to figure out the underlying issue.
5 Why, but How?
This framework works on a very simple principle — Keep asking “why” and you will discover much deeper problems behind any user behavior.
By repeatedly asking the question “Why” (five is a good rule of thumb), you can peel away the layers of symptoms which can lead to the root cause of a problem.
Also, why 5? You can ask any number of whys until you reach the root cause. 5 is just an indicative number, sometimes 3 whys might be enough, while other times you might have to ask more than 5 whys to get to the issue.
I know, it’s hard to imagine, so let’s go through some examples.
Problem Statement: You are on your way home from work and your car stops in the middle of the road.
- Why did your car stop? — Because it ran out of gas.
- Why did it run out of gas? — Because I didn’t buy any gas on my way to work.
- Why didn’t you buy any gas this morning? — Because I didn’t have any money.
- Why didn’t you have any money? — Because I lost it all last night in a poker game.
- Why did you lose your money in last night’s poker game? — Because I’m not very good at “bluffing” when I don’t have a good hand.
So, the core reason comes up because of the last why.
Problem Statement: Users are experiencing frequent crashes and slow performance in a web application.
Why? — The application’s server storage is insufficient.
Why? — The server infrastructure was not scaled up to meet increasing user demands.
Why? — There was no proactive monitoring and performance optimization of the server infrastructure.
Why? — The operations team did not have visibility into the growing user base.
Why? — There is no mechanism in place to provide real-time user growth data to the operations team.
Root Cause: The absence of proactive monitoring and lack of visibility into user growth prevented timely scaling of the server infrastructure, resulting in poor app performance.
Solution: Implement real-time user growth tracking and establish proactive monitoring processes to ensure a scalable and performant application.
Issue: Server crashed again
Why? — Maybe because we pushed a new API to the server recently
Why? — Because we launched a new feature, it probably didn’t use the API correctly
Why? — We have a new engineer who doesn’t know how to use that API
Why? — Because we never trained him to use it
Why? — Because the manager wanted to get him on production asap with minimal training and was only given a few days to get familiar with the existing code base.
So, here we found that the server crashing might be caused by the new feature/API, but the real cause is an untrained engineer.
Best Practices while applying this framework
I hope the examples above are more than enough to convey what exactly the 5 Why framework is and how you can use it to get to the root cause of the problem.
Let’s talk about some of the best practices:
- You need to listen more and talk less while asking questions.
- You should formulate some open-ended Why questions.
- Be ready to challenge the assumptions: Encourage critical thinking and challenge assumptions throughout the process. This helps avoid jumping to conclusions and ensures a thorough exploration of potential causes.
- Iterate and Refine: The 5 Whys is an iterative process. As you uncover root causes, re-evaluate and refine your questions to ensure you’re getting to the deepest level of causality. This may involve revisiting earlier answers to further investigate or validate the findings.
Do you want to become a PM?
If you are an aspiring Product Manager and don’t know where you can start, you are at the right place.
For starters, you can follow me, go through the other stuff I have written, and learn as much as you can from here.
If that isn’t enough or doesn’t help, you can checkout this toolkit I created for beginners like you to get started with PM topics, learn the skills they really need to become PMs and prepare for PM roles.
If you want a more personalised learning experience, consider joining our Product Management cohort at Crework — Apply now
