You’ve got a user. You even know what situations they’ve got a problem in. And theeeeen you’ve stopped. Not thought about what they can and can’t do. What constraints are real and which are imagined.
Disproof
Widely agreed docs stating which constraints impact your user’s ability to make decisions, that demonstrably informs design constraints at solution stage.
Consequences
All user problems arise from the capability gap described by what they Can't Not Do and what they Can't Do
In other words, the gap of perceived capabilities/resources vs a task that is important to them
I say Can’t Not Do because it's often driven by an unwillingness to accept the consequences of not doing (miss social events or get fired etc.), rather than anything they actually must do
The user's understanding of their own constraints (capability/compliance) is often wrong, and in some cases (B2C) so is their understanding of what they want to do
If you don't even have these constraints in mind, you overextend building something that users can't even use due to being 'blocked' from accessing value, run out of money and die
Even if you understand the constraints as your users do, you miss massive opportunities in getting users to relax imagined constraints (the ones with non-occurring bad consequences)
Any solution you build is going to be suboptimal
You might succeed mildly, get complacent, and get rekt by someone who's figured out how to serve the same users better or cheaper because they dug deeper
Users churn, revenue drops, you burn through your runway, and you die
Causes
Most teams simply don't recognise that there are first-order constraints that drive second-order, imagined constraints
As an aside: this is the same reason why these teams and their leaders are not fixing their own companies. They are trapped in the imagined constraints and compulsions.
Largely because this type of thinking only occurs when workloads have been balanced correctly so that somebody capable is doing proper thinking, yet most product teams are:
under-resourced
doing the wrong work (like a VP's pet project)
wasting their time doing someone else’s work (like explaining shit that is in the docs)
Approaches
Create the thinking time and defend it like your equity depends on it
Make it someone’s responsibility with a deliverable artefact
If struggling for buy-in, demonstrate what happens if this doesn't, get agreement on it