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December 27, 2024 - January 20, 2025
I graduated and naively thought business would be human centered. I spent the first 14 years of my career continuously disappointed that this wasn’t the case.
the mindset requires that you start thinking in outcomes rather than outputs.
The company rightly started with a desired outcome: To increase the average number of accounts per customer. However, they didn’t pair this outcome mindset with a customer-centric mindset, that is critical for long-term product success.
this conflict between business needs and customer needs is prevalent in every industry. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
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.” He argues that a company’s purpose is to serve the customer. Instead of framing business needs as at odds with customer needs, Drucker is aligning the two,
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.
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?”
An outcome communicates uncertainty. It says, We know we need this problem solved, but we don’t know the best way to solve it.
When considering outcomes for specific teams, it helps to distinguish between business outcomes, product outcomes, and traction metrics.
The key is to use traction metrics only when you are optimizing a solution and not when the intent is to discover new solutions. In those instances, a product outcome is a better fit.
Teams also need continuous feedback on their progress toward their goal, supporting the argument that goals should be measurable.
More recent research on goal setting involving more complex tasks, like the ones product trios face, found that challenging goals can decrease performance if the team doesn’t have strategies for how to achieve their goal.
These studies found that encouraging teams to “do their best” was more effective than setting specific, challenging goals.
high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.”
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.”
our job is not to address every customer opportunity. Our job is to address customer opportunities that drive our desired outcome.
This obsession with producing outputs is strangling us.
software teams that use kanban see an increase in quality and consistency in delivery and a decrease in customer complaints. They found that limiting work in progress was a key component of this success29.
As Karl Weick, an educational psychologist at the University of Michigan, advises in the second opening quote, wisdom is finding the right balance between having confidence in what you know and leaving enough room for doubt in case you are wrong.
We do want to be data-informed. But we also want to move forward.
However, creativity research tells us that our first idea is rarely our best idea.
Study after study found that the individuals generating ideas alone outperformed the brainstorming groups.
Participants started by ideating on their own. Then they shared their ideas with the group. Then they went back to ideating on their own.
In addition to ideating at different times and in different places, take advantage of incubation.42 Incubation occurs when your brain continues to consider a problem even after you’ve stopped consciously thinking about it.
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.
“Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again.” — Karl Popper “Each answer a team collects—positive or negative—is a unit of progress” — Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, Sense & Respond
We need to remember that our goal is to satisfy customer needs while creating value for our business.
what customers ask for isn’t always what they need.
Walk your stakeholder through what you learned and what decisions you made. Give them space to follow your logic, and, most importantly, give them time to reach the same conclusion.
When product teams engage with their customers week over week, they don’t just get the benefit of interviewing more often—they also start rapid prototyping and experimenting more often.
continuous interviewing is a keystone habit for continuous discovery.
Remind them what impact they expected a feature to have. Share with them the impact the feature actually had.
