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

by Teresa Torres

alternating between individual ideation and group sharing of ideas can improve the quality of ideas generated in subsequent individual ideation sessions.41 Exposure to other people’s ideas did inspire new ideas.

When generating ideas on your own, it’s only a matter of time before you’ll get stuck. Generating ideas is hard work and takes effort. The first thing to recognize when you get stuck is that it happens to everyone. You aren’t bad at generating ideas. You are creative.

Your extreme users will vary by product, but thinking about the needs of different types of users as they relate to your target opportunity can help you generate more ideas that may work for everyone.

The more diversity in the group, the more diverse ideas you’ll generate. However, make sure that you set the context for ideation by sharing your target opportunity and the customer context in which that opportunity occurs.

“Just assume that you are being overconfident, and give yourself a healthy margin of error.” — Chip and Dan Heath, Decisive

Every product team has, at one time or another, found themselves facing the hard reality that they spent time, energy, and money building the wrong product.

Confirmation bias45 means we are more likely to seek out confirming evidence than we are to seek out disconfirming evidence.

The escalation of commitment46 is a bias in which the more we invest in an idea, the more committed we become to that idea. The

Ethical assumptions: Is there any potential harm in building this idea? This is an area that is grossly underdeveloped for many product trios. As an industry, we need to do a better job of asking questions like: What data are we collecting? How are we storing it? How are we using it? If our customers had full transparency to those answers, would they be okay with it?

As product trios, we don’t always need to mitigate every potential area for harm, but we should be aware of the impact our products and services are having and ask how we can reduce the potential harm.