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

by Teresa Torres

For too long, product teams have defined their work as shipping the next release. When we engage with stakeholders, we talk about our roadmaps and our backlogs. During our performance reviews, we highlight all the great features we implemented. The vast majority of our conversations take place in the solution space. We assume that success comes from launching features. This is what product thought leader Melissa Perri calls “the build trap.”28 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. Instead, our customers care about solving their needs, pain points, and desires. Product strategy happens in the opportunity space. Strategy emerges from the decisions we make about which outcomes to pursue, customers to serve, and opportunities to address. Sadly, the vast majority of product teams rush past these decisions and jump straight to prioritizing features. We obsess about the competition instead of about our customers. Our strategy consists of playing catch-up, and, no matter how hard we work, we always seem to fall further and further behind.