Real Problems Rarely Respect Org Charts

Most organizations are good at generating goals.

Increase conversion. Improve retention. Reduce churn. Shorten lead time. Grow revenue.

And once those goals exist, teams are usually even better at generating things to do.

Build a new onboarding flow. Redesign checkout. Launch a campaign. Change pricing. Add an integration.

But there is often a missing question between the goal and the work:

What is the most important problem we need to solve?

That question sounds almost trivial. In practice, it changes how an organization thinks.

Goals are often owned by teams. Problems rarely are.

Real problems rarely respect org charts.

A customer does not care which department owns the friction they experience. They experience one problem, even when solving it requires several parts of the organization to contribute.

In the North Star Framework, this missing layer is called Top Problems.

The layer most strategy models skip

The North Star Framework connects five levels:

North Star → Product Drivers → Top Problems → Current Goals → The Work

Each level answers a different question.

The North Star describes the long-term direction. Product Drivers describe the forces we believe will move us in that direction. Current Goals define measurable outcomes for the current cycle. The Work contains the activities, experiments and tasks we perform.

Top Problems sit in the middle.

They describe the most important problems we need to solve right now in order to advance a Product Driver.

That middle layer matters because organizations have a natural tendency to jump from direction to goals, or even directly from direction to solutions.

We know we need to improve conversion, so let's redesign checkout.

We know retention is weak, so let's build a loyalty program.

We know onboarding takes too long, so let's add an onboarding wizard.

Maybe those are good ideas. But they are already solutions.

Top Problems force us to stay with the problem for a little longer.

Goals tell you where you want to get. Problems tell you what is in the way.

Imagine an e-commerce company with a Product Driver around increasing the share of visitors who complete a transaction.

A possible Top Problem might be:

Customers find products they want, but many do not complete the purchase.

That statement does not tell anyone what to build.

And that is exactly the point.

The underlying causes might be very different. Customers may not trust the payment flow. Shipping costs may appear too late. Mobile checkout may have too much friction. Payment methods may be missing. Customers may have unanswered questions about delivery or returns.

If the organization jumps directly to "redesign checkout", it has already narrowed the solution space before it fully understands the problem.

A Top Problem keeps that space open.

It creates a shared object for discovery, discussion and learning before the organization commits to a particular response.

Are Top Problems unique to the North Star Framework?

Not literally.

There are other approaches that deliberately create a problem or opportunity layer between outcomes and solutions. Teresa Torres' Opportunity Solution Tree is a good example: it connects a desired outcome to customer opportunities, then to possible solutions and experiments.

So I would not claim that North Star Framework invented problem-oriented thinking.

What is unusual, however, is making the organization's currently most important problems a first-class layer in the strategy-to-execution model.

Traditional OKRs, for example, are primarily structured around Objectives and measurable Key Results, often followed by initiatives. That can work very well for goal setting. But the framework itself does not require an explicit shared problem layer between strategic direction and those goals.

That difference may look small:

Strategy → Goals → Initiatives

versus:

Strategy → Problems → Goals → Work

But in my experience, it changes the conversation.

Instead of asking only, "What should our goals be?", the organization also asks:

"What are the few problems important enough for us to focus on right now?"

Real problems rarely respect org charts

This becomes especially powerful when a Top Problem crosses organizational boundaries.

Goals are often owned by teams. Problems rarely are.

Most important problems cut across the structure we have created to run the organization. The org chart may be necessary for accountability, leadership and expertise, but it is rarely a useful description of how customers experience a problem.

Take the checkout example again.

Why are customers abandoning their purchase?

Product might investigate the user journey.

Engineering might discover that the mobile payment flow is slow or unreliable.

Marketing might find that campaigns create expectations that the checkout experience does not match.

Customer Support might see recurring questions about delivery and returns.

Finance or commercial teams might identify limitations in payment methods or pricing.

From an organizational perspective, these are different departments.

From the customer's perspective, they are one problem.

This is where Top Problems can become a surprisingly effective mechanism for alignment.

Instead of each department starting with its own goals and then trying to coordinate dependencies, several teams can start from the same problem and contribute different Current Goals toward solving it.

One Top Problem might therefore lead to several goals:

• Product and Engineering reduce mobile checkout friction from one measured level to another.
• Marketing reduces the mismatch between campaign promise and landing experience.
• Customer Support reduces recurring uncertainty around delivery and returns.
• The commercial team tests whether additional payment options improve completion.

Different teams. Different expertise. Different goals.

One shared problem.

Shared problem does not mean shared project

This distinction is important.

Cross-functional collaboration often turns into a large project with a project manager, a long dependency map and a growing coordination overhead.

That is not what Top Problems require.

A Top Problem creates shared context, not necessarily shared execution.

Teams can remain autonomous. They can own different Current Goals, run different experiments and work in different systems. What connects them is an explicit understanding of the problem they are collectively trying to change.

That creates a different kind of alignment.

Not alignment through meetings.

Alignment through structure.

Top Problems also make prioritization more honest

Every organization has more problems than it can solve.

Calling something a Top Problem therefore means something.

It says:

This problem is important enough, right now, that solving it should materially advance one of our Product Drivers.

That makes prioritization visible.

A new initiative can be challenged with a simple question:

Which Top Problem does this help us solve?

If the answer is unclear, that does not automatically mean the initiative is wrong. Organizations always have operational work, maintenance, compliance, incidents and other necessary activities that do not belong in the strategic model.

But if something is presented as strategic work, the connection should be explainable.

This is one of the reasons Top Problems help reduce the distance between strategy and everyday decisions. Teams do not need to interpret a strategy slide every time a new idea appears. They have a smaller, more concrete set of problems against which to evaluate it.

A Top Problem is not a backlog item

The word "Top" matters.

Top Problems are not a collection of everything that is wrong with the company, the product or the customer experience.

They are not a backlog.

They are not feature requests.

They are not solutions disguised as problems.

And they should not become permanent categories that survive simply because nobody remembers why they were created.

They represent the problems that matter now.

As the organization learns, some will be solved. Some will turn out to be less important than expected. Some will be reframed because the original understanding was wrong.

That is healthy.

The purpose is not to prove that the organization identified the correct problem on day one. The purpose is to make its current understanding explicit enough to learn from it.

From alignment around goals to alignment around reality

Goal frameworks are useful because they help organizations agree on what they want to achieve.

But agreement on a goal does not necessarily mean agreement on what is preventing you from achieving it.

That gap matters.

Two teams can support exactly the same company objective while holding completely different assumptions about the underlying problem. They can both execute well, hit local milestones and still pull in different directions.

Top Problems make those assumptions visible.

They give leadership and teams something concrete to discuss:

Is this really the problem?

Is it important enough?

What evidence do we have?

What have we learned?

Are several parts of the organization seeing different sides of the same problem?

And only then:

What should we do about it?

That may be the most important contribution of Top Problems.

They create a place between strategy and execution where the organization can think together before everyone starts building.

Because sometimes the fastest way to get more done is not to align teams around more work.

It is to align them around the right problem.