Structuring Ambiguous Problems

Krishnam's first move when handed a vague brief is to resist the pull toward solutions and instead make the problem concrete. He clarifies the outcome, maps the current state end-to-end, identifies the bottleneck, and prioritizes by impact and effort before touching a solution. This approach has shown up consistently across different contexts. At Navi, a one-line retention brief became a structured research program. At Ola Krutrim, a fragmented sales process became a scoped automation project with a clear success metric. At bequant.dev, a general drop-off problem became a specific hypothesis about user comprehension. He distinguishes between product thinking and project thinking: the goal is to understand the end outcome before mapping the how. This keeps him from solving the wrong problem at speed. The output of his structuring process is always a prioritized set of testable hypotheses, not a project plan.