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February 14 - May 5, 2025
I was tired of the day-to-day reality of evangelizing product management at yet another founder-led startup. I was tired of sitting in conference rooms arguing with executives about our product strategy when I was the only one who had spent time with our customers. I was tired of debating with sales reps about why we weren’t going to build every feature that prospects requested. I was tired of having to convince my colleagues that a relentless focus on customers was a better strategy than obsessing about our competitors. Sadly, this is the work of a product executive.
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’ll adopt 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.
How we frame an ill-structured problem impacts how we might solve it. Additionally, Jonassen suggests that we can’t simply start with one framing. Instead, he argues, good problem-solvers try out many framings, exploring how each impacts the solution 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.
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.
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.
You want to summarize what you are learning in a way that is easy to understand, that highlights your key decision points and the options that you considered, and creates space for them to give constructive feedback. A well-constructed opportunity solution tree does exactly this.
When sharing your discovery work with stakeholders, you can use your tree to first remind them of your desired outcome. Next, you can share what you’ve learned about your customer, by walking them through the opportunity space. The tree structure makes it easy to communicate the big picture while also diving into the details when needed. Your tree should visually show what solutions you are considering and what tests you are running to evaluate those solutions. Instead of communicating your conclusions (e.g., “We should build these solutions”), you are showing the thinking and learning that
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When we manage by outcomes, we give our teams the autonomy, responsibility, and ownership to chart their own path. Instead of asking them to deliver a fixed roadmap full of features by a specific date in time, we are asking them to solve a customer problem or to address a business need. The key distinction with this strategy over traditional roadmaps is that we are giving the team the autonomy to find the best solution.
Additionally, this strategy leaves room for doubt. 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.
managing by outcomes communicates to the team how they should be measuring success. A clear outcome helps a team align around the work they should be prioritizing, it helps them choose the right customer opportunities to address, and it helps them measure the impact of their experiments. Without a clear outcome, discovery work can be never-ending, fruitless, and frustrating.
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.
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.
Outcomes Are the Result of a Two-Way Negotiation Setting a team’s outcome should be a two-way negotiation between the product leader (e.g., Chief Product Officer, Vice President of Product, etc.) and the product trio.
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. We often need to do some discovery to learn how to best measure a product outcome.
Product trios tend to fall into four categories when it comes to setting outcomes: 1) they are asked to deliver outputs and don’t work toward outcomes (this is, by far, the most common scenario); 2) their product leader sets their outcome with little input from the team; 3) the product trio sets their own outcomes with little input from their product leader; 4) the product trio is negotiating their outcomes with their leaders as described in this chapter.
asked to deliver outputs with no regard for outcomes, try these tips to shift toward a more outcome-focused mindset:
Picking & negotiating outcomes
I worked with a team that helped students choose university courses who set their outcome as “Increase the number of course reviews on our platform.” When I asked them what the impact of more reviews was, they answered, “More students would see courses with reviews.” That’s not necessarily true. The team could have increased the number of reviews on their platform, but if they all clustered around a small number of courses, or if they were all on courses that students didn’t view, they wouldn’t have an impact. A better outcome is “Increase the number of course views that include reviews.” To
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we think we understand why we do the things we do. But the reality is, our brains are exceptionally good at creating coherent (but not necessarily true) stories that deceive us.
It’s also why Kahneman argues confidence isn’t a good indicator of truth or reality. He writes, “Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it.” Not necessarily the truth.
Gazzaniga’s study means you can’t simply ask your customers about their behavior and expect to get an accurate answer. Most will obligingly give you what sounds like a reasonable answer. But you won’t know if they are telling you about their ideal behavior or their actual behavior. Nor will you know if they are simply telling you a coherent story that sounds true but isn’t true in practice.
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?
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.
You’ll want to tailor the scope of the question based on what you need to learn at that moment in time. A narrow scope will help you optimize your existing product. Broader questions will help you uncover new opportunities. The broadest questions might help you uncover new markets.
One of the most effective ways to do this is to inform your participant that you would like them to share their full story with you, to share as many details as possible, to leave nothing out, and that, when they are done with their story, you’ll ask for missing details.
When a participant uses vivid language, be sure to capture their exact words.
An opportunity represents a need, a pain point, or a desire that was expressed during the interview. Be sure to represent opportunities as needs and not solutions.
If the participant requests a specific feature or solution, ask about why they need that, and capture the opportunity (rather than the solution). A good way to do this is to ask, “If you had that feature, what would that do for you?”
The goal with the snapshot is to capture as much of what you heard in each interview as possible.
The hardest part about continuous interviews is finding people to talk to. In order to make continuous interviewing sustainable, we need to automate the recruiting process. Your goal is to wake up Monday morning with a weekly interview scheduled without you having to do anything.
The most common and easiest way to find interview participants is to recruit them while they are using your product or service. You can integrate a single question into the flow of your product: “Do you have 20 minutes to talk with us about your experience in exchange for $20?” Be sure to customize the copy to reflect the ask-and-offer that works best for your audience. If the visitor answers “Yes,” ask for their phone number.
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). Remember, a story-based interview question starts with, “Tell me about a specific time when…”
But our job is not to address every customer opportunity. 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.
Is this opportunity framed as a customer need, pain point, or desire and not a solution? Is this opportunity unique to this customer, or have we seen it in more than one interview? If we address this opportunity, will it drive our desired outcome?
“Structure is done, undone, and redone.”
When a customer expresses emotion in an interview, it’s usually a strong signal that an opportunity is lurking nearby. However, don’t capture the feeling itself as the opportunity. Instead, look for the cause of the feeling.
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.
wisdom is finding the right balance between having confidence in what you know and leaving enough room for doubt in case you are wrong.
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).
the most original ideas tend to be generated toward the end of the ideation session.37
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.
a reminder
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.38
Research shows that while we are better at generating ideas individually, we are better at evaluating ideas as a group.44
The escalation of commitment46 is a bias in which the more we invest in an idea, the more committed we become to that idea. The more the city explored this idea (and this idea alone), the more committed to the idea they became—despite its flaws. Product teams are particularly susceptible to confirmation bias and the escalation of commitment.
Not being specific enough. I see many teams generate assumptions like this: “Customers will have time,” “Customers will know what to do,” and “Our engineers can build something like this.” These assumptions are not specific enough to test. What will customers have time for? What do you need them to know how to do? What do engineers need to build? Be specific.
