This is spot on.
I spend a bunch of my time helping ux, business and dev folk play nice together. This is definitely one of the major problems and something I babble on about to tedious extremes.
It's usually not as simple as a lack of trust though. It's more often things like people not having good ways to communicate the problem (as opposed to possible solutions). Or organisations being set up in such a way that the technical folk aren't in-play at the point where problem discovery is happening. Or the non-technical folk being assessed on "solution providing" not "problem defining".... and so on.
Trust is sometimes an issue - but it's often not the major cause.
(There is also a class of tech folk in some organisations who aren't interested in that level of problem - who want to get "the spec" and focus on the implementation problems that interest them more.... but I don't think this is the kind of tech folk the OP is talking about).
This is the fundamental problem and is, I think, largely due to the fact that the kinds of problems we are solving do not naturally fall into the neat specialties into which most companies categorize their workers. Specialization promotes serial thinking whereas what's needed is near simultaneous thinking and that requires deep communication (and smart people)
In an environment where everyone is smart and driven (such as SV), being a good problem solver is just not enough. Being good at finding and articulating valuable problems is much harder, and I would bet that more startups/founders fail at this. Part of this is because, most people are never trained, and never think to ask what makes a valuable problem.
When I work on my own personal projects I get to do both, which is why the work I do for myself is miles ahead of the work I do for clients.
1) A clip from Moneyball: http://youtu.be/HiB9L3dG-Aw
2) I remember from a book about someone marketing in Japan. They were trying to sell a rice cooker that could also cook other foods. They couldn't understand why this convenience wouldn't sell. It seemed to solve a "problem." In many consumer interviews, a passing comment revealed the new problem they had actually created. Housewives feared that the taste of other foods would creep into the rice and ruin it. They stopped selling the cooker.
Given that the author is the founder of health tech startup (EligibleAPI.com), it's hard not to read this as being implicit in the post :)
Some people have a background that deals mostly in perception and form, while others deals mostly in structure and function. If both balance strategic trade-offs of the product, both are designers. If they only execute plans, they are craftsmans and technicians.
Which one of them is better for "defining" the problem deppends on the problem. Both can learn to have holistic vision, and how to understand where their expertise and skills end.
There are creative and intuitive technical people. They are out there, as many as "artists" that can truly design products.
Anyways, this is right on the money. Finding the problem is an art in itself. It's only once we find the root problem that we can design the holistic solution, otherwise it's a whole bunch of patched held together by desperation and neediness.
Example: if it turns out poverty is related to global warming and for the past decade we've spend resources trying to rid poverty in isolation, we are all sorts of screwed.
This is exactly the job of a Product Designer.
Provider: I think this bridge design will fit your needs.
