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

by Teresa Torres

Kahneman argues confidence isn’t a good indicator of truth or reality. He writes, “Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it.” Not necessarily the truth.

Our failure wasn’t due to a lack of research. It was because we asked our customers the wrong questions. We built a product based on a coherent story told by both the thought leaders in our space and by our customers themselves. But it wasn’t a story that was based in reality. If you want to build a successful product, you need to understand your customers’ actual behavior—their reality—not the story they tell themselves.

The key to interviewing well is to distinguish what you are trying to learn (your research questions) from what you ask in the interview (your interview questions).

Our primary research question in any interview should be: What needs, pain points, and desires matter most to this customer?

the best way to learn about their needs, pain points, and desires is to ask them to share specific stories about their experience. You’ll need to translate your research questions into interview questions that elicit these stories. Memories about recent instances are more reliable than our generalizations about our own behavior or our answers to direct questions.

Instead of asking, “What criteria do you use when purchasing a pair of jeans?”—a direct question that encourages our participant to speculate about their behavior—we want to ask, “Tell me about the last time you purchased a pair of jeans.” The story will help us uncover what criteria our participant used when purchasing a pair of jeans, but because the answer is situated in a specific instance (an actual time when they bought jeans), it will reflect their actual behavior, not their perceived behavior.

if you work at a streaming-entertainment company and you are trying to increase viewer engagement, you might ask, “Tell me about the last time you watched our streaming-entertainment service.” This question will help you learn about pain points and challenges with your product.

But you may want to widen the scope. You might say, “Tell me about the last time you watched any streaming entertainment.” This question will elicit stories about your product but also stories about your competitors.

You’ll want to tailor the scope of the question based on what you need to learn at that moment in time. A narrow scope will help you optimize your existing product. Broader questions will help you uncover new opportunities. The broadest questions might help you uncover new markets.

The appropriate scope will depend on the scope you set when creating your experience map

One of the most effective ways to do this is to inform your participant that you would like them to share their full story with you, to share as many details as possible, to leave nothing out, and that, when they are done with their story, you’ll ask for missing details.

A good story has a protagonist who encounters experiences on a timeline. Temporal prompts are one of the most effective ways to guide the participant through their own story. You can ask, “Start at the beginning. What happened first?”

If your participant isn’t sure where to start, you can further prompt, “Where were you? Set the scene for me.” As the participant tells their story, you can encourage them to keep going by asking them, “What happened next?” Sometimes they might skip a few steps, and you may need to ask, “What happened before that?” Thinking about their story as having a beginning, a middle, and an end can help you guide the participant. Use your customer-experience map to help you track their story. Listen for specific nodes. Ask about nodes that were left out of the story.

“Who was with you?” “What challenges did you encounter?” “How did you overcome that challenge?” “Did anyone help you?”

You’ll notice, as you excavate the story, that your participant will bounce back and forth between the story they are telling and generalizing about their behavior. You might ask, “What challenges did you face?” and they may respond with, “I usually…” or, “In general, I have this challenge…” You’ll want to gently guide them back to telling you about this specific instance. You might say, “In this specific example, did you face that challenge?”

Keep the interview grounded in specific stories to ensure that you collect data about your participants’ actual behavior, not their perceived behavior. And remember, like most of the habits in this book, it takes practice. Don’t get discouraged. Keep at it. You will get better with time.

First, you decide which type of story to collect. You can ask a more open question like: “Tell me about the last time you watched streaming entertainment.” Or you can ask for a more specific story: “Tell me about the last time you watched streaming entertainment on a mobile device.”

An interview snapshot is a one-pager designed to help you synthesize what you learned in a single interview. It’s how you are going to turn your copious notes into actionable insights. Your collection of snapshots will act as a reference or index to the customer knowledge bank you are building through continuous interviewing.

An opportunity represents a need, a pain point, or a desire that was expressed during the interview. Be sure to represent opportunities as needs and not solutions. If the participant requests a specific feature or solution, ask about why they need that, and capture the opportunity (rather than the solution). A good way to do this is to ask, “If you had that feature, what would that do for you?” For example, if an interviewee says, “I wish I could just say the name of the movie I’m searching for,” that’s a feature request. If you ask, “What would that do for you?” they might respond, “I don’t want to have to type out a long movie title.” That’s the underlying need. The benefit of capturing the need and not just the solution is that the need opens up more of the solution space.

Opportunities don’t need to be exact quotes, but you should frame them using your customer’s words. This will help ensure that you are capturing the opportunity from your customer’s perspective and not from your company’s perspective.

One of the most important elements to capture on the interview snapshot is an experience map that captures each participant’s unique story. When creating an interview snapshot, our goal is to process and understand what we heard and to capture it in a way that will make our research referenceable and actionable in the future.

If interviewing is about discovering opportunities, it’s easy to think that, once you’ve chosen a target opportunity, you can pause interviewing. But this assumes that you chose the right target opportunity, that you’ll be able to address that opportunity, and that everything will go according to plan.

To make sure continuous interviewing is a robust habit, make sure everyone on your team is well-versed in recruiting and interviewing.

Ditch the discussion guide. Instead, generate a list of research questions (what you need to learn), and identify one or two story-based interview questions (what you’ll ask). Remember, a story-based interview question starts with, “Tell me about a specific time when…”

use your interview snapshots to share what you are learning with the rest of the organization.

Rather than synthesizing a batch of interviews, synthesize as you go, using interview snapshots.

Most product teams are devoted to serving their customers, and, when they hear about a need or a pain point, they want to solve it. But our job is not to address every customer opportunity. Our job is to address customer opportunities that drive our desired outcome. This is how we create value for our business while creating value for our customers. Limiting our work to only the opportunities that might drive our desired outcome is what ensures that our products are viable over the long run and not just desirable in the moment.

Our goal should be to address the customer opportunities that will have the biggest impact on our outcome first.

To unlock the power of deconstructing big, intractable challenges into a series of more solvable, smaller opportunities, we need a well-structured opportunity space. A key concept that drives this structure is the idea of distinctness. We need each opportunity to be distinct from every other opportunity. If there’s overlap, then we can’t work on one at a time.

two ways to uncover the underlying structure of your opportunity space. The first is to use the steps of your experience map that you created in Chapter 4. The second is to use your interview drawings to identify key moments in time. Both strategies accomplish the same goal—they help you organize the opportunity space by distinct moments so that there is no overlap from one branch to the next.

experience map that showcases what your customers do to address their needs today.

Our goal is to identify distinct moments in time during your customers’ experience. Oftentimes this is as simple as mapping each node in your experience map to the top level of opportunities on your opportunity solution tree.

for each opportunity, ask the following questions: Is this opportunity framed as a customer need, pain point, or desire and not a solution? Is this opportunity unique to this customer, or have we seen it in more than one interview? If we address this opportunity, will it drive our desired outcome?

For example, “The interface is hard to use” is way too broad of an opportunity. We could boil the ocean trying to address every usability issue in our product. Instead, we want to get more specific. Where did this pain point show up in your customer’s story? This may turn into several opportunities:

One of the biggest challenges with opportunity mapping is that it looks deceptively simple. However, it does require quite a bit of critical thinking. You’ll want to examine each opportunity to ensure it is properly framed, that you know what it means, and that it has the potential to drive your desired outcome.

Avoid Common Anti-Patterns

Opportunities framed from your company’s perspective. Product teams think about their product and business all day every day. It’s easy to get stuck thinking from your company’s perspective rather than your customers’ perspective. However, if we want to be truly human-centered, solving customer needs while creating value for the business, we need to frame opportunities from our customers’ perspective.

Opportunities are solutions in disguise. Often in an interview, your customer will ask for solutions. Sometimes they will even sound like opportunities. For example, you might hear a customer say, “I wish I could fast-forward through commercials.” You might be tempted to capture this as an opportunity. However, this is really a solution request. The easiest way to distinguish between an opportunity and a solution is to ask, “Is there more than one way to address this opportunity?” In this example, the only way to allow people to fast-forward through commercials is to offer a fast-forward solution. This isn’t an opportunity at all. Instead, we want to uncover the implied opportunity.

An opportunity should have more than one potential solution. Otherwise, it’s simply a solution in disguise.

do note when a customer expresses a feeling, but consider it a signpost, and remember to let it direct you to the underlying opportunity.

“You are never one feature away from success…”

This obsession with producing outputs is strangling us. It’s why we spend countless hours prioritizing features, grooming backlogs, and micro-managing releases. The hard reality is that product strategy doesn’t happen in the solution space. Our customers don’t care about the majority of our feature releases. A solution-first mindset is good at producing output, but it rarely produces outcomes.

For each set that we are considering, we want to ask, “Which of these opportunities affects the most customers?” and “the most often?” We can and should make rough estimates here. You can use behavioral data (e.g., site analytics, sales-funnel analytics), support tickets, sample surveys, or even your interview snapshots, to quickly evaluate which opportunities are impacting the most customers. It’s important, however, to distinguish how many customers from how often.

If we interviewed and opportunity mapped well, every opportunity on our tree will represent a real customer need, pain point, or desire. However, not all opportunities are equally important to customers. We’ll want to assess how important each opportunity is to our customers and how satisfied they are with existing solutions.31 We want to prioritize important opportunities where satisfaction with the current solution is low, over opportunities that are less important or where satisfaction with current opportunities is high.

Remember, you aren’t making absolute judgments. You are making relative judgments by comparing and contrasting sibling opportunities against each other. You don’t need to score each opportunity. This will take a lot of work, will be rife with assumptions, and won’t lead to a better decision. Instead, make a data-informed, subjective comparison for each set of factors.

When we turn a subjective, messy decision into a quantitative math formula, we are treating an ill-structured problem as if it were a well-structured problem. The problem with this strategy is that it will lead us to believe that there is one true, right answer. And there isn’t. Once we mathematize this process, we’ll stop thinking and go strictly by the numbers.

When we treat this like the messy, subjective decision that it is, we are leaving room for doubt, so that, down the road, if we learn we are addressing the wrong opportunity, we will be far more likely to course-correct.

we’ll learn more by making a decision and then seeing the consequences of having made that decision than we will from trying to think our way to the perfect decision.

The four sets of factors (opportunity sizing, market factors, company factors, and customer factors) are designed to be lenses to give you a different perspective on the decision. Use them all.

Some teams go into this exercise with a conclusion in mind. As a result, they don’t use the lenses to explore the possibilities and instead use them to justify their foregone conclusion. This is a waste of time. Go into this exercise with an open mind. You’ll be surprised by how often you come away from it with a new perspective.