More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
October 23 - October 28, 2022
And finally, teams continued to be measured by what they delivered, not whether anyone used it or if it created any value for the customer or the business.
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.
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.
the following definition of continuous discovery: 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
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.
In Decisive, the Heath brothers outline many tactics for overcoming the four villains of decision-making, which is why it is the first book (after this one) that I recommend all product managers read.
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?”
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.
Our primary research question in any interview should be: What needs, pain points, and desires matter most to this customer?
Memories about recent instances are more reliable than our generalizations about our own behavior or our answers to direct questions.
To nurture your interviewing habit, interview at least one customer every week.
Product teams think about their product and business all day every day. It’s easy to get stuck thinking from your company’s perspective rather than your customers’ perspective.
The hard reality is that product strategy doesn’t happen in the solution space.
When we turn a subjective, messy decision into a quantitative math formula, we are treating an ill-structured problem as if it were a well-structured problem. The problem with this strategy is that it will lead us to believe that there is one true, right answer. And there isn’t. Once we mathematize this process, we’ll stop thinking and go strictly by the numbers.
Quantity Leads to Quality
When generating ideas on your own, it’s only a matter of time before you’ll get stuck. Generating ideas is hard work and takes effort. The first thing to recognize when you get stuck is that it happens to everyone. You aren’t bad at generating ideas. You are creative.
Each assumption lives in one spot on the two-dimensional grid. You want to find the moment in space that represents how important an assumption is to the success of the idea and how much evidence we have or don’t have to support
Now remember, you aren’t trying to prove that this assumption is true. The burden of truth is too much. You are simply trying to reduce risk.
It’s called the curse of knowledge.55 Once we know something (like we do in this situation, we have a wealth of discovery work that supports our point of view), it’s hard for us to remember what it was like not to have that knowledge.
