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

by Teresa Torres

The more folks involved in each decision, the longer it will take to reach that decision. You want to balance speed of decision-making with inclusiveness.

start thinking in outcomes rather than outputs.

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

Rather than obsessing about features (outputs), we are shifting our focus to the impact those features have on both our customers and our business (outcomes). Starting with outcomes, rather than outputs, is what lays the foundation for product success.

Most product trios don’t have a lot of experience with driving outcomes. They grew up in a world where they were told what to build. Or they were asked to generate outputs, with little thought for what impact those outputs had. So, when we shift from an output mindset to an outcome mindset, we have to relearn how to do our jobs.

If product trios tasked with delivering a desired outcome want to pursue business value by creating customer value, they’ll need to work to frame the problem in a customer-centric way. They’ll need to discover the customer needs, pain points, and desires that, if addressed, would drive their business outcome.

In this book, I’ll refer to customer needs, pain points, and desires collectively as “opportunities”—they represent opportunities to intervene in our customers’ lives in a positive way. Why don’t we call them “problems to solve”? In the product world, we don’t just solve customer problems. The word “problem” implies something needs fixing. However, we have many examples of products or services that don’t fix problems. Disneyland entertains me.

So, to make sure this model is more inclusive of such products, I’ll use opportunities to represent customer needs, pain points, and desires collectively and the opportunity space to represent the problem space as well as the desire space.

The implication for product trios is that two of the most important steps for reaching our desired outcome are first, how we map out and structure the opportunity space, and second, how we select which opportunities to pursue. Unfortunately, many product trios skip these steps altogether. They start with an outcome and simply start generating ideas. We do have to get to solutions—shipping code is how we ship value to our customers and create value for our business. But the right problem framing will help to ensure that we explore and ultimately ship better solutions.

underlying structure to discovery that we can use to guide our work. It starts with defining a clear outcome—one that sets the scope for discovery. From there, we must discover and map out the opportunity space—this is what gives structure to the ill-structured problem of reaching our desired outcome. It’s the all-important problem framing that opens up the solution space. And finally, we need to discover the solutions that will address those opportunities and thus drive our desired outcome.

For most of us, when we encounter a problem, we simply want to solve it. This desire comes from a place of good intent. We like to help people. However, this instinct often gets us into trouble. We don’t always remember to question the framing of the problem. We tend to fall in love with our first solution. We forget to ask, “How else might we solve this problem?” These problems get compounded when working in teams. When we hear a problem, we each individually jump to a fast solution. When we disagree, we engage in fruitless opinion battles. These opinion battles encourage us to fall back on our organizational roles and claim decision authority (e.g., the product manager has the final say), instead of collaborating as a cross-functional team. When a team takes the time to visualize their options, they build a shared understanding of how they might reach their desired outcome. If they maintain this visual as they learn week over week, they maintain that shared understanding, allowing them to collaborate over time. We know this collaboration is critical to product success.

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?” We’ll compare and contrast our options. Instead of falling in love with our first idea, we’ll ask, “What else could we build?” or “How else might we address this opportunity?” Visualizing your options on an opportunity solution tree will help you catch when you are asking a “whether or not” question and will encourage you, instead, to shift to a compare-and-contrast question.

Good discovery doesn’t prevent us from failing; it simply reduces the chance of failures. Failures will still happen. However, we can’t be afraid of failure. Product trios need to move forward and act on what they know today, while also being prepared to be wrong. The habits in this book will help you balance having confidence in what you know with doubting what you know, so that you can take action while still recognizing when you are on a risky path.8

Many of the decisions we make in discovery feel like big strategic decisions. That’s because they often are. Deciding what to build has a big impact on our company strategy, on our success as a product team, and on our customers’ lives. However, most of the decisions that we make in discovery are reversible decisions. If we do the necessary work to test our decisions, we can quickly correct course when we find that we made the wrong decision. This gives us the luxury of moving quickly, rather than falling prey to analysis paralysis.

When we learn through testing that an idea won’t work, it’s not enough to move on to the next idea. We need to take time to reflect. We want to ask: “Based on my current understanding of my customer, I thought this solution would work. It didn’t. What did I misunderstand about my customer?” We then need to revise our understanding of the opportunity space before moving on to new solutions.10

As a product trio gains experience with opportunity solution trees, the shape of their tree will help guide their discovery work. The depth and breadth of the opportunity space reflects the team’s current understanding of their target customer. If our opportunity space is too shallow, it can guide us to do more customer interviews. A sprawling opportunity space, on the other hand, reminds us to narrow our focus. If we aren’t considering enough solutions for our target opportunity, we can hold an ideation session. If we don’t have enough assumption tests in flight, we can ramp up our testing. While many teams work top-down, starting by defining a clear desired outcome, then mapping out the opportunity space, then considering solutions, and finally running assumption tests to evaluate those solutions, the best teams also work bottom-up. They use their assumption tests to help them evaluate their solutions and evolve the opportunity space. As they learn more about the opportunity space, their understanding of how they might reach their outcome (and how to best measure that outcome) will evolve. These teams work continuously, evolving the entire tree at once. They interview week over week, continuing to explore the opportunity space, even after they’ve selected a target opportunity. They consider multiple solutions for their target opportunity, setting up good “compare and contrast” decisions. They run assumption tests across their solution set, in parallel, so that they don’t...

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. It gives the product trio the latitude they need to explore and pivot when needed.

This research suggests that product trios, when faced with a new outcome, should first start with a learning goal (e.g., discover the opportunities that will drive engagement) before being tasked with a performance goal (e.g., increase engagement by 10%). This approach can be particularly helpful because it’s common to have uncertainty around the best way to measure your outcome.

To shift your outcome from less of an output to more of an outcome, question the impact it will have.

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

Remember, what matters most to your customer trumps what you need to learn.

Since we can’t ask our customers direct questions about their behavior, the best way to learn about their needs, pain points, and desires is to ask them to share specific stories about their experience.

Finding the right story question can be challenging. The scope of the story that you’ll want to elicit will change throughout your discovery process.

The broadest questions might help you uncover new markets.

Keep the interview grounded in specific

stories to ensure that you collect data about your participants’ actual behavior, not their perceived behavior.

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).

story-based interview question starts with, “Tell me about a specific time when…”

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.

Rather than jumping to the first need that we might address, Dewey argues, good thinking requires that we explore our options—that we carry out a systematic search for longer than we feel comfortable. We should compare and contrast the impact of addressing one opportunity against the impact of addressing another opportunity. We want to be deliberate and systematic in our search for the highest-impact opportunity.

These tasks will require rigorous critical thinking, but the effort will help to ensure that we are always addressing the most impactful opportunity.

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.

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.

Review each opportunity on your tree and ask, “Have we heard this in interviews?” If you had to add opportunities to support the structure of your tree, you might ask, “Can I imagine a customer saying this?” Or are we just wishing a customer would say this?

you won’t be working with each top-level opportunity in isolation. You don’t want to ask, “Should we pursue this opportunity?” That’s a “whether or not” question that leads to poor decisions. It makes us susceptible to confirmation bias, and we forget to consider opportunity cost. Instead, you’ll compare and contrast the set of parent opportunities against each other.

Compare and contrast is the way to evaluate between opportunities.

“Which of these opportunities affects the most customers?” and “the most often?” We can and should make rough estimates here.

It’s important, however, to distinguish how many customers from how often. Every customer might be impacted by an opportunity, but the need or pain point might arise only occasionally. Addressing this opportunity will have a different impact than addressing an opportunity that impacts some customers all the time.

We want to prioritize opportunities that support our company vision, mission, and strategic objectives over opportunities that don’t.

Across all three levels—company, business group, and team—you’ll also want to consider strengths and weaknesses. Some companies will be better positioned to tackle some opportunities over others. Some teams may have unique skills that give them an unfair advantage when tackling a specific opportunity.

Customer factors help us evaluate how important each opportunity is to our customers. If we interviewed and opportunity mapped well, every opportunity on our tree will represent a real customer need, pain point, or desire.

When assessing and prioritizing the opportunity space, it’s important that we find the right balance between being data-informed and not getting stuck in analysis paralysis. It’s easy to fall into the trap of wanting more data, spending just a little bit more time, trying to get to a more perfect decision. However, 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. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, made this exact argument in his 2015 letter to shareholders,33 where he introduced the idea of Level 1 and Level 2 decisions. He describes a Level 1 decision as one that is hard to reverse, whereas a Level 2 decision is one that is easy to reverse. Bezos argues that we should be slow and cautious when making Level 1 decisions, but that we should move fast and not wait for perfect data when making Level 2 decisions.

Researchers measure creativity using three primary criteria: fluency (the number of ideas we generate), flexibility (how diverse the ideas are), and originality (how novel an idea is).35

But for the strategic opportunities where you want to differentiate from your competitors, you’ll want to take the time to generate several ideas to ensure that you uncover the best ones.

Osborn outlined four rules for brainstorming. One, focus on quantity. In other words, generate as many ideas as you can. Two, defer judgment, and separate idea generation from idea evaluation. Three, welcome unusual ideas. And four, combine and improve ideas. He suggested that groups come together real-time, face-to-face (remember he predated the digital, asynchronous communication tools we have today), to generate ideas together, using these four rules.

Runa Korde and Paul Paulus, researchers at the University of Texas-Arlington, ran a series of studies that showed 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.

Dot voting is a simple method that facilitates group evaluation. Research shows that while we are better at generating ideas individually, we are better at evaluating ideas as a group.

It’s important after you are done dot-voting to take a quick poll and make sure everyone on the team is excited about the set you are moving forward with. This doesn’t mean you have to have consensus on all three options. But everyone on the team should be excited about at least one idea, and each idea should have a strong advocate in the group. If that’s not the case, revisit your set of ideas, and dot-vote again.

Our goal for now is to set up a good compare-and-contrast decision: Which of these three ideas best delivers on our target opportunity?