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

by Teresa Torres

And finally, teams continued to be measured by what they delivered, not whether anyone used it or if it created any value for the customer or the business.

Today, many teams work on a weekly or even daily release schedule. More frequent releases meant we could measure the impact of what we were building sooner.

That means rather than defining your success by the code that you ship (your output), you define success as the value that code creates for your customers and for your business (the outcomes). Rather than measuring value in features and bells and whistles, we measure success in impact—the impact we have had on our customers’ lives and the impact we have had on the sustainability and growth of our business.

Customer-centric: The second mindset places the customer at the center of our world. It requires that we not lose sight of the fact (even though many companies have) that the purpose of business is to create and serve a customer. We elevate customer needs to be on par with business needs and focus on creating customer value as well as business value.

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

“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” — Albert Einstein

Opportunity solution trees are a simple way of visually representing the paths you might take to reach a desired outcome. The root of the tree is your desired outcome—the business need that reflects how your team can create business value. Next is the opportunity space. These are the customer needs, pain points, and desires that, if addressed, will drive your desired outcome.

Shifting from a project mindset to a continuous mindset is hard. We tend to take our six-month-long waterfall project, carve it up into a series of two-week sprints, and call it “Agile.” But this isn’t Agile. Nor is it continuous. A continuous mindset requires that we deliver value every sprint. We create customer value by addressing unmet needs, resolving pain points, and satisfying desires.

Instead of framing our decisions as “whether or not” decisions, this book will teach you to develop a “compare and contrast” mindset. Instead of asking, “Should we solve this customer need?” we’ll ask, “Which of these customer needs is most important for us to address right now?”

A business outcome measures how well the business is progressing. A product outcome measures how well the product is moving the business forward. A traction metric measures usage of a specific feature or workflow in the product.

Common goal-setting advice encourages us to set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (S.M.A.R.T.) goals. The research on goal setting, however, muddies the waters.

Now you could easily argue that the scope should be “How do customers entertain themselves with video, music, and video games?” Or even, “How do customers entertain themselves online?” These options could all work. There’s not one right scope. The key is to have a conversation as a team about the scope that gives you room to explore while staying focused on your outcome. Once you’ve defined the scope of your experience map, you are ready to take an inventory of your individual knowledge before working to develop a shared understanding of what you collectively know.

The majority of us think we are above-average drivers, healthy eaters, and great listeners. It gets worse. Like the woman buying jeans, we think we understand why we do the things we do. But the reality is, our brains are exceptionally good at creating coherent (but not necessarily true) stories that deceive us.

Gazzaniga’s study means you can’t simply ask your customers about their behavior and expect to get an accurate answer. Most will obligingly give you what sounds like a reasonable answer. But you won’t know if they are telling you about their ideal behavior or their actual behavior. Nor will you know if they are simply telling you a coherent story that sounds true but isn’t true in practice.

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.

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.