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

by Teresa Torres

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

Peter Drucker, in the opening quote of this chapter, argues that the goal of a business is to “convert society’s needs into opportunities for a profitable business.”

OSTs Resolve the Tension Between Business Needs and Customer Needs Opportunity solution trees help you resolve the tension between business needs and customer needs. You start by prioritizing your business need—creating value for your business is what ensures that your team can serve your customer over time. Next, the team should explore the customer needs, pain points, and desires that, if addressed, would drive that outcome. The key here is that the team is filtering the opportunity space by considering only the opportunities that have the potential to drive the business need. By mapping the opportunity space, the team is adopting a customer-centric framing for how they might reach their outcome.

Chip and Dan Heath, in their book Decisive, outline four villains of decision-making that lead to poor decisions. The first villain is looking too narrowly at a problem. This is exactly why we want to explore multiple ways of framing the opportunity space. The second villain is looking for evidence that confirms our beliefs. This is commonly known as confirmation bias. We’ll be discussing this bias often throughout the book. We’ll be exploring several habits that will help us overcome this bias and ensure that we are considering both confirming and disconfirming evidence. The third villain is letting our short-term emotions affect our decisions. In the product world, this often shows up when we fall in love with our ideas. The fourth villain is overconfidence. This, too, is common in the product world. We are often sure our ideas will be runaway successes.

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?”

Nigel Cross, Emeritus Professor of Design Studies at the Open University in the United Kingdom, compared the knowledge, skills, and abilities of expert designers to novice designers (across a variety of disciplines) and found that the best designers evolve the problem space and the solution space together.9 As they explore potential solutions, they learn more about the problem, and, as they learn more about the problem, new solutions become possible. These two activities are intrinsically intertwined. The problem space and the solution space evolve together.

The key to bringing stakeholders along is to show your work. You want to summarize what you are learning in a way that is easy to understand, that highlights your key decision points and the options that you considered, and creates space for them to give constructive feedback. A well-constructed opportunity solution tree does exactly this.

“An outcome is a change in human behavior that drives business results.” — Josh Seiden, Outcomes Over Output

discovery work to identify the connections between product outcomes (the metrics they can influence) and business outcomes (the metrics that drive the business).

A fixed roadmap communicates false certainty. It says we know these are the right features to build, even though we know from experience their impact will likely fall short. An outcome communicates uncertainty. It says, We know we need this problem solved, but we don’t know the best way to solve it.

Without a clear outcome, discovery work can be never-ending, fruitless, and frustrating.

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.