Pain

Short definition

What the user experiences when the product stops them doing what they came to do, independently of the technical cause and of the ticket's category.

Full definition

The word circulates in product discovery and in sales in the broad sense of a customer problem — the pain point, understood as a commercially exploitable difficulty.

In the articles on this blog, it designates the unit of arbitration that replaces the ticket's category. It is described by its nature, the population it touches, its frequency, its impact, whether it is blocking or regulatory, the support load it generates and the damage it does to trust. It cannot be deduced from the origin: a minor defect, an absent capability or an unsuitable design produce the same pain from the point of view of whoever suffers it.

Usage in the field

Arbitration between items of different origins, preparing a daily, selecting the subjects handled from support reports.

Synonyms and variants

pain point · irritant · friction in use.

Not to be confused with

• Defect — the internal qualification of a gap from expected behaviour, indifferent to the effect felt.
• Customer signal — information that reaches the team from a customer; pain is what it reports, the signal is its trace.
• Severity (blocker, major, minor, trivial) — a scale attached to the ticket by the team, which classifies without measuring usage.
• Need — what the user is trying to obtain; pain is being prevented from obtaining it.

Examples

A user who cannot produce a mandatory tax filing: maximum pain, no defect.

A button to click twice: a real defect, low pain.

Ambiguities / debates

In sales, "pain" often designates an exploitable market problem, which moves the word from the felt experience to the opportunity.

Pain is declarative: it is collected from people who don't always phrase it, and who sometimes express it in the vocabulary of the ticketing tool.