Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
Structuring a Root Cause analysis
Why & How to structure a Root Cause Analysis Document
Why structure, isn’t finding the root cause enough?
Most usually root cause analysis is done to find the true problems in a situation. Every situation that occurs in a company will always have some interested parties or stakeholders who are curious as to why it happened or is happening so every time any root cause analysis is complete it is very important to present the findings to the relevant parties.
So, what is the structure?
The Problem Statement: clearly define the problem statement of what exactly happened and the timeline of events in the context of the problem.
User Journey: A clear user journey view of the currently live product and related relevant information.
Stakeholder questions - Based on the Hypothesis as a PM we have to prepare a set of questions for relevant stakeholders of the product. Again here these questions can be grouped into internal & external factors as these questions are generated from the hypothesis made.
Responses - After getting on a group call or individual calls with respective stakeholders we list out their responses to these questions and also list out relevant notes around the responses.
Hypothesis: Hypothesise why the problem might have occurred. The hypothesis can be prepared based on the responses from the relevant stakeholders. This hypothesis serves as a starting point for digging into data, analytics and metrics to see any changes.
Qualitative analysis: Explain what were the conclusions and results of the qualitative analysis. Examples of qualitative analysis can look into reviews, customer complaints, social media posts etc.
Quantitative Analysis: Looking into GTM or other data from the relevant analytical tools used for collecting product metrics will yield some conclusions and insights which need to be explained.
Narrow down on the root cause: Among all the hypotheses made some will be negated or discarded and some of the hypotheses will match. These matching hypothesis needs to be expanded on and explained as the conclusion of the root cause analysis.
Solutions: Based on the root cause and your idea and the context of the business you will need to come up with solutions. Usually, short-term patches and long-term fixes are where you can start to list out the solutions.