Continous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

Author: Teresa Torres

Foreword

What Chris Mercury gained by practicing Continous Discovery Habits:

Improved team’s confidence that they knew what they were doing. After a few wins, team started to believe that they could achieve anything.
Improved customer and business outcomes.

S.No. Before After
1. Chopping and changing discovery approach. Needing lots of meetings to work out what to do next More structured discovery process. People knew what was expected of them and delivered more consistent results.
2. Superficial understanding of their customers. Heavy, infrequent research. Developed deeper understanding of customer’s needs, problems and desires through regular contact and lightweight research methods.
3. Having a list of metrics to increase and outputs to deliver. Fewer goals, more clarity, a focus on solving the customer’s problems in ways that drive business value.
4. Falling in love with a single idea and building it. Come up with many ideas. Learn faster by testing sets of ideas and running smaller simulations.
5. Discovery and delivery were separate responsibilities. More collaboration, with most of the team involved in customer interviews, mapping the customer journey, ideating on solutions, discussing results. Whole team contributes at key points along the way, learn and adjust course together.
6. Wait to show leaders big reports and presentations. Have tools to show leaders team’s thinking earlier and have better conversations about where to go next.

Introduction

This book will teach a structured and sustainable approach to continous discovery that will help me answer the following questions:

  • Am I making a product/service that my customers want?
  • How do I ensure that I’m improving my product/service over time?
  • How do I guarantee that my team is creating value for my customers in a way that creates value for my business?

After reading this book and practicing the habits, product work will still be hard and I will still make plenty of mistakes, but I will

  • make better product decisions
  • dramatically increase my chances of success

I. What is Continous Discovery

At a minimum, weekly touchpoints with customers
By the team building the product
Where they conduct small research activities
In pursuit of a desired outcome

Goal: Infuse product team’s everyday decisions with as much customer input as possible.

Discovery vs Delivery

Discovery Delivery
The work I do to decide what to build. The work I do to build and ship a product.

Both need to be balanced.

A digital product is never done. Teams should continously keep discovering new products to solve unmet customer needs and keep iterating on existing ones.

The Evolution of Modern Product Discovery

Product management looks different everywhere today.

II. The 11 Habits

III. Developing my Continuous Discovery Habits

1. Build my Trio and work together to decide what to build (can be more than 3 people, can be people that are design/PM/engineering-minded or are interested in these if Designers/PMs/Engineers are not available)

  • Guiding principle: “How can I include all three disciplines in as many discovery decisions as I can? Make next week look better than last week. Repeat.”

2. Start Talking to Customers Every Week

  • Once my trio is in place, I’m ready to adopt this keystone habit of Continous Discovery.
  • Keystone habits are habits that, once adopted, drive the adoption of other habits.
  • Start small, talk to someone similar to my customers if I can’t find a single customer to talk to. Use each conversation to get introduced to another person to talk to.

3. Work Backward

  • Ask the following 2 questions and I would have also built my first OST:
    • “If our customers had this solution, what would it do for them?”
      • If possible, ask this question to customers.
      • Try to uncover the implied opportunity. Consider customer needs, pain points and desires.
    • “If we shipped this feature, what value would it create for our business?”
      • Refine our answer until we get to a clear metric - that’s our outcome.
  • Story map
    • ideas as I work on requirements for solutions I was asked to build
    • use to identify hidden assumptions
      • will help notice the evidence around me that either supports or refutes them
      • work with my stakeholders to evolve the idea once I uncover a faulty assumption
    • when a stakeholder brings a solution and identify assumptions with them. The idea will improve then and there.
  • Work with my stakeholders to identify the impact they expect a given feature to have. Document that conversation.
    • As I implement the feature, be sure to instrument what I need to measure against the expected impact.
    • Start doing postrelease impact reviews with my stakeholders. Remind them what impact they expected a feature to have. Share with them the impact the feature actually had.
    • If it falls short, as it inevitably will, share the implied opportunity I uncovered by asking, “Are we trying to solve this customer problem with this feature?”
    • If my stakeholder agrees, ask if we can consider alternative solutions to that same customer need. Or better yet, ideate with my stakeholders.
    • Congratulations! I just built out the first mini-branch of my OST.
  • The best time to advocate for discovery is when a feature falls short of expectations.
    • This is a great time to share what we are learning in our interviews.
    • Approach the situation as a collaborative problem solver.
    • Work with my stakeholders to evolve our processes. If they push back, let up.
    • Read the room, and adjust my suggestions accordingly.

4. Use my Retrospectives to Reflect and Improve

  • Meet regularly as a trio to reflect on our discovery process.
  • Ask “What did we learn during this sprint that surprised us?”
    • Make a list. Then, for each item on the list, ask, “How could we have learned that sooner?” The answers to these questions will help us improve our discovery process.
  • As I conduct this retrospective, be nice to myself. Remember, no matter how good I get at discovery, I’ll still run into surprises. Surprises help us improve. Take the time to learn from them.

5. Avoid these Common Anti-Patterns

  • Focusing on why a given strategy won’t work (AKA “That will never work here”), instead of focusing on what is within my control.
    • The habits in this book have been adopted and worked at types of companies. They need to be adapted to the unique organizational context, but in every instance, the organizations were able to look at what each team could do, given the context in which they worked, and found a way.
  • Being the annoying champion for the “right way” of working.
    • There is no “one right way” to do discovery.
    • This book isn’t designed to be recipes that should be followed to the T, but rather templates that should help me get started.
    • Once I have a handle on how they work, I can and should adopt them to better meet my own needs.
    • Adopt a continuous-improvement mindset. If next week looks better than last week, I am on the right track.
  • Waiting for permission instead of starting with what is within my control.
    • Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Get started by talking to anyone who is like our customers. Iterate from there.