Define.
Naming what you are lifting up truthfully — before reaching for an answer.
A point-of-view statement, a constraint set, and a paragraph naming what would not count as solving the problem.
In Week 01 you went to five people. In Week 02 you will refuse, against the strong instinct of every restless mind, to skip ahead to solutions.
Define is the stage almost everyone gets wrong. Even very smart students arrive at this week with five interviews behind them and a half-formed product idea already in their heads. The product idea will feel exciting. It will feel inevitable. And eight times out of ten, it will be wrong — because the underlying problem has not yet been named clearly enough to know what an answer would even look like.
This week you will write a point of view. A POV is one sentence with three parts:
[User] needs [need] because [insight].
The User is specific (not "community members" but "parents who walk their kindergartners to the public library on Tuesday mornings"). The Need is what they actually need (not what you think they need). The Insight is what your interviews surfaced that almost nobody outside this room knows.
If you cannot write that sentence yet, you do not understand the problem yet. Go back to the interviews. Read what you wrote down — especially the one thing you did not yet know how to interpret. That sentence usually contains the insight.
We share the rest with the people building this with us.
The full stage — the disciplines, the formation note, the reference essays, and the weekly deliverable — is part of the cohort experience. Tell us where you fit and we'll send you the rest.