The Solution Designer's diagnostic lens

As a Solution Designer, your most critical skill comes before design - it begins with problem diagnosis.

When business leaders ask for a "smarter chatbot," a "faster agent screen," or to "move our old app to the cloud," they're describing symptoms, not causes. Take those requests at face value and you'll be putting a plaster on a broken process. Instead, your job is to listen and diagnose the root causes. We call these Pega-shaped problems.

The instinct is simple: keep asking why until you see the real constraint. That's what tools like the 5 Whys are for. Push past the initial request and you'll uncover the bottlenecks, decision gaps, broken journeys, and coordination failures that are actually holding the business back.

Pega-shaped problems are the ones we can fix with better workflows, decisioning, orchestration, data visibility, and end-to-end case management.

This diagnostic mindset matters because enterprise problems rarely arrive with clean solution boundaries. A client will not say, “We need governed AI decisioning at scale.” They will say, “Our claims process takes 14 days, and our competitors do it in 4.” The Solution Designer’s job is to hear that statement and investigate what is really happening across the case lifecycle. Where does time get lost? Which handoffs break down? Where are decisions inconsistent, manual, or invisible?

Recognizing a Pega-shaped problem is the first step. The next step is framing the problem in a way that makes the value of its solution clear to business stakeholders and prepares it for design in Pega Blueprint™. That means moving from a vague symptom to a structured opportunity that can be modeled, prioritized, and acted on.

A well-framed Pega-shaped problem is:

• Significant in impact — solving it would create meaningful business value
• Clear in time to value — progress and results can be demonstrated quickly
• Strategically durable — the solution will remain valuable as the business evolves
• Structurally addressable — it can be represented through workflows, decisions, data, and personas
• Actionable for stakeholders — it gives leaders enough clarity to make decisions about scope, investment, and priority

If a problem does not meet these criteria, it is not discarded, but refined. Often, that simply means going one layer deeper. “The process is slow” is still a symptom. “The handoff between underwriting and compliance has no SLA, no owner, and no visibility” is the beginning of a diagnosable design problem.

In this module, you learn to apply this diagnostic lens across four major domains of the modern enterprise, how to identify the structural root causes behind common business challenges, and how to qualify the right Pega solutions to address them.

This will include:

• Operations: How to save back-office workflows from manual 'black holes' and rigid legacy ERPs by wrapping them in an agile, center-out orchestration layer.
• Customer Engagement: How to shift organizations from tone-deaf, batch-based marketing campaigns to a centralized 'Brain' that delivers real-time, empathetic 1:1 decisioning.
• Customer Service: How to rescue contact centers from 'swivel-chair' agent overload and broken self-service by implementing true end-to-end case resolution.
• Legacy Transformation: How to break the cycle of modernization paralysis, helping clients rethink, reimagine, and really retire their technical debt instead of just 'lifting and shifting' it.

By putting it all together, you learn how to transition from finding the problem to designing the solution, using Pega Blueprint.
 

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This Topic is available in the following Module:

• Pega-shaped problems v1