Insights on strategy, websites, UX, and digital growth

There is a simple but powerful idea known as Kidlin's Law: if you can write the problem down clearly, the matter is half solved. It captures something that sounds obvious but is surprisingly rare in practice.

Most people rush to fix things before they truly understand them. They describe symptoms, not causes. They prescribe solutions before diagnosing the issue. Sound familiar?

Half the solution is knowing the problem

Kidlin's Law is a useful rule of thumb, especially in digital projects. Far too often, the problem has not been defined at all.

When someone says they need a new website, or a digital platform, or a piece of marketing automation, what they really mean is they are trying to fix something. Maybe it is lead generation. Maybe it is efficiency. Maybe it is reputation. But unless you can name the problem clearly, and everyone around the table agrees that is the problem, you cannot know if the solution will work.

At best, you might stumble across something that helps by accident. At worst, you will spend time and money solving the wrong thing entirely.

How misalignment quietly derails projects

When we run discovery workshops to plan a new digital project, we often see this happen in real time.

Key stakeholders arrive with firm ideas about what they need, yet those ideas rarely align. A marketing manager wants more leads. Sales wants better leads. Operations wants fewer wasted enquiries. Each one is legitimate, but unless those problems are reconciled, the business ends up trying to solve three different things at once.

The real work begins when everyone agrees what the actual problems are. Only then can you start designing solutions that make a measurable difference.

A real-world example of solving the wrong thing

A few years ago, a prospect came to us asking, "Do you do chatbots?"

We asked why.

Their answer: "Because we are not getting enough leads through our website. We think a chatbot is the solution."

It is a common jump, linking a lack of leads to a missing feature. But as we asked more questions, we uncovered something else. The problem was not the number of leads; it was the quality. They were attracting the wrong type of enquiries, people who were never going to buy from them. And because the website's positioning, messaging, and navigation were unclear, the right people were quietly walking away.

A chatbot was not the fix. The website was.

Once we had reframed the problem, we could see that improving clarity, audience targeting, and messaging would have far greater impact. And that is exactly what happened.

Design follows definition

That story repeats itself in different forms all the time. The starting point is rarely wrong, it is just incomplete. The moment you define the problem properly, everything sharpens. Priorities align. Teams start pulling in the same direction.

The same principle applies to us as digital partners and shapes how we approach every project. Clients don't come looking for a website or a digital platform; they come because they have a pain point. It is our job to define it clearly, make sure eveyrone agrees, and then build the right solution to solve it.

That is why so much of the effort in any successful project happens before a single line of code is written or a design is sketched. The architecture, navigation, content structure, and digital strategy all rest on knowing what problem we are actually solving.

Get that right, and the rest follows naturally.