problem-framing-canvas

This skill guides product managers and teams through MITRE's Problem Framing Canvas (Innovation Toolkit v3), an interactive facilitation process for arriving at a clearer, better-validated problem statement before jumping to solutions. It addresses a common failure mode in product work: solving the wrong problem due to confirmation bias, overlooked stakeholders, and solution-first thinking. Rather than brainstorming features, it broadens perspective and challenges assumptions to produce an equity-driven problem statement.

The canvas is structured into three phases that the skill walks through with one-question-at-a-time prompts. Look Inward examines the team's own assumptions, biases, and how they might be part of the problem. Look Outward maps who experiences the problem, who benefits from it, who does not have it, and who has been left out. Reframe synthesizes those insights into a restated problem and an actionable 'How Might We' question. A companion template captures the outputs, an example file shows a sample, and the skill defers to a shared workshop-facilitation protocol for interaction style, entry modes, progress labels, and pause/resume behavior. It accepts context supplied at invocation and skips questions already answered.

It is aimed at product managers, facilitators, and cross-functional teams starting discovery for a new initiative, reframing a suspected wrong problem, or aligning stakeholders on a problem definition. The source explicitly notes when not to use it: for well-understood validated problems, tactical bug fixes or technical debt, or when stakeholders have already committed to a solution. It is a pure guidance and facilitation skill with no code, so its scope is limited to structured questioning and document generation.