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

by Teresa Torres

Many work in organizations where the leaders have not had a chance to see how good product teams work up close. And as such, they’re unable to effectively coach and develop their people.

Discovery isn’t a one-time activity. A digital product is never done. It can and should continue to evolve.

They are collectively responsible for ensuring that their products create value for the customer in a way that creates value for the business. This book

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. For most teams, their trio needs to consist of at least a product manager, designer, and software engineer.

for most frameworks, tools, and methodologies to be successful, it’s not just your tactics that need to change but also your mindset.

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.

We elevate customer needs to be on par with business needs and focus on creating customer value as well as business value.

embrace the cross-functional nature of digital product work and reject the siloed model, where we hand off deliverables through stage gates. Rather than the product manager decides, the designer designs, and the engineer codes, we embrace a model where we make team decisions while leveraging the expertise and knowledge that we each bring to those decisions.

Many of us may not have scientific training, but, to do discovery well, we need to learn to think like scientists identifying assumptions and gathering evidence.

Rather than thinking about discovery as something that we do at the beginning of a project, you will learn to infuse discovery continuously throughout your development process.

Product teams make decisions every day. Our goal with continuous discovery is to infuse those daily decisions with as much customer input as possible.

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?”

Many organizations try to define clear boundaries between the roles in a product trio. As a result, some have come to believe that product managers own defining the problem and that designers and software engineers own defining the solution. This sounds nice in theory, but it quickly falls apart in practice.

Many business outcomes, however, are lagging indicators. They measure something after it has happened. It’s hard for lagging indicators to guide a team’s work because it puts them in react mode, rather than empowers them to proactively drive results.

As a general rule, product trios will make more progress on a product outcome rather than a business outcome.

The product trio brings customer and technology knowledge to the conversation and should communicate how much the team can move the metric in the designated period of time (usually one calendar quarter). The trio should not be required to communicate what solutions they will build at this time, as this should emerge from discovery.

Bianca Green, business faculty at University of Twente (in the Netherlands), and her colleagues found that teams who participated in the setting of their own outcomes took more initiative and thus performed better than colleagues who were not involved in setting their outcomes16.

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%).

It’s easy when working in a team to experience groupthink. Groupthink occurs when a group of individuals underperform due to the dynamics of the group.

If you want to build a successful product, you need to understand your customers’ actual behavior—their reality—not the story they tell themselves.

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

Remember, it’s much easier to continue a weekly habit than to start and stop a periodic behavior. Continuous interviewing ensures that you stay close to your customers.

A solution-first mindset is good at producing output, but it rarely produces outcomes.

Researchers at the University of Oulu in Finland conducted a literature review on the benefits of kanban and found that software teams that use kanban see an increase in quality and consistency in delivery and a decrease in customer complaints.

You always want to choose a leaf-node opportunity (i.e., one that has no children) because our goal is to deliver iterative value over time.

Now, not all opportunities need an innovative solution. You don’t need to reinvent the “forgot password” workflow (but you should still test it—more on that in Chapter 11). 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.

For decades researchers ran studies in which they compared the creative output of brainstorming groups against the creative output of the same number of individuals generating ideas alone. Study after study found that the individuals generating ideas alone outperformed the brainstorming groups. Individuals generated more ideas, more diverse ideas, and more original ideas.

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.