What Makes a Big Solution (and Why It's Not the Same as a Big Project)

The term "Big Solution" in journey management has a specific meaning that is easy to misread. It does not mean a massive project, an ambitious initiative, or a bet-the-company investment. It means something structurally different from any of those — and the distinction matters for how organizations design, resource, and execute them.

What a Big Solution Actually Is

A Big Solution is a unifying concept that gives coherence and direction to multiple smaller efforts. It does not replace those smaller efforts. It connects them.

Before a Big Solution exists, emerging solutions — the projects already underway across multiple teams — exist in isolation. Each addresses some aspect of a customer need. Each has an owner, a timeline, and a set of deliverables. None of them is designed with the others in mind, which means their combined impact on the customer experience is likely to be fragmented: small improvements at multiple points that do not add up to a coherent, significantly better experience.

A Big Solution provides the concept that makes these efforts cohere. "We are building a knowledge layer that helps customers make confident decisions early in their journey" is a Big Solution. It does not specify which team owns which piece, what technology each component uses, or what the full implementation timeline is. It specifies the direction — and within that direction, the marketing team's comparison tool, the UX team's improved product descriptions, and the content team's expert guides can each find their place.

"A Big Solution is not a 'massive project.' It is a unifying concept that encapsulates multiple emerging solutions, addresses broader problems, creates long-term value, and can be built incrementally."

The Four Properties of a Good Big Solution

It encapsulates multiple emerging solutions. A Big Solution that is only one team's work is probably not big enough. The value of the concept is precisely that it provides a home for efforts that would otherwise remain separate.

It addresses broader problems. A Big Solution should address a pain or opportunity cluster, not a single insight. If it can be traced back to a single customer frustration, it is probably an emerging solution, not a Big Solution.

It can be built incrementally. The test plan for a Big Solution should begin with the smallest possible experiment — the most minimal version of the concept that can be tested with customers and measured against the experience score it is targeting. Big Solutions that require full implementation before any measurement is possible are projects designed to resist learning.

It creates long-term value. The question is not just "will this work?" but "will this still be worth maintaining in two years?" Big Solutions that create durable capabilities — knowledge systems, customer feedback loops, trust-building mechanisms — are more valuable than Big Solutions that solve a current problem in a way that will need to be replaced when the context changes.

How to Recognize When Something Is Not a Big Solution

Some proposals present themselves as Big Solutions but are actually large implementations of a single idea. The test is: can the solution be broken into at least three or four distinct components that could be developed and tested separately?

If the answer is no — if the solution is essentially one thing that either works or does not — it may be an emerging solution that has been given an ambitious scope rather than a true Big Solution. Developing it as a Big Solution will create unnecessary coordination overhead without the synthesis benefit that makes the structure worthwhile.

A useful reframe: rather than asking "is this big enough?", ask "does this create the conditions under which multiple teams can contribute meaningfully?" That is the question a Big Solution is designed to answer affirmatively.