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

by Teresa Torres

more structured discovery process. People knew what was expected

regular contact and lightweight research methods.

With our leaders, we no longer wait to show them big reports and presentations. Now we have the tools to show them our thinking earlier and have better conversations about where to go next.

discover, iterate, and refine products that deliver value for their customers in a way that drives value for their businesses.

They are testing their assumptions. Rather than just validating their ideas,

Good?

Designers bring visual, interactive, and systems-design chops that help to ensure that customers will understand how to best use a product and delight in that use. Software engineers bring the technical chops to ensure that the product is reliable, stable, and delivers on its promise.

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 some teams it will make sense to add a fourth or even a fifth member to this decision-making squad.

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).

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

make team decisions while leveraging the expertise and knowledge that we each bring to those decisions.

The habits in this book will encourage you to draw, to externalize your thinking, and to map what you know.

learn to think like scientists identifying assumptions and gathering evidence.

evolve from a project mindset to a continuous mindset. 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.

ensure that you are always able to get fast answers to your discovery questions, helping to ensure that you are building something that your customers want and will enjoy.

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

“Managers must convert society’s needs into opportunities for profitable business.” — Peter Drucker “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” — Albert Einstein

profit should not come at the cost of serving the customer.

Rather than obsessing about features (outputs), we are shifting our focus to the impact those features have on both our customers and our business (outcomes). Starting with outcomes, rather than outputs, is what lays the foundation for product success.

Those last two lines of the definition are critical. We aren’t doing research for research’s sake. We are doing research so that we can serve our customers in a way that creates value for our business.

Finding the best path to your desired outcome is what researchers call an “ill-structured problem”

Much of the work when tackling an ill-structured problem is framing the problem itself.5 How we frame a problem has a big impact on how we might solve it.

If product trios tasked with delivering a desired outcome want to pursue business value by creating customer value, they’ll need to work to frame the problem in a customer-centric way. They’ll need to discover the customer needs, pain points, and desires that, if addressed, would drive their business outcome.

customer needs, pain points, and desires collectively as “opportunities”

The word “problem” implies something needs fixing. However, we have many examples of products or services that don’t fix problems.

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.

To reach their desired outcome, a product trio must discover and explore the opportunity space. The opportunity space, however, is infinite.

How the team defines and structures the opportunity space is exactly how they give structure to the ill-structured problem...

good problem-solvers try out many framings, exploring how each impacts the solution space.

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.

How did I decide what to do next in discovery?

It starts with defining a clear outcome—one that sets the scope for discovery. From there, we must discover and map out the opportunity space—this is what gives structure to the ill-structured problem of reaching our desired outcome. It’s the all-important problem framing that opens up the solution space. And finally, we need to discover the solutions that will address those opportunities and thus drive our desired outcome.

visualize it using an opportunity solution tree (OST).

desired outcome—the business need that reflects how your team can create business value.

the opportunity space. These are the customer needs, pain points, and desires that, if addressed, will drive your desired outcome.

assumption tests. This is how we’ll evaluate which solutions will help us best create customer value in a way that drives business value.

The key here is that the team is filtering the opportunity space by considering only the opportunities that have the potential to drive the business need.

The outcome and the opportunity space constrain the types of solutions the product trio might consider.

remember to question the framing of the problem.

“How else might we solve this problem?”

When a team takes the time to visualize their options, they build a shared understanding of how they might reach their desired outcome.

Teams can then focus on solving one opportunity at a time. With time, as they address a series of smaller opportunities, these solutions start to address the bigger opportunity.

The first villain is looking too narrowly at a problem. This is exactly why we want to explore multiple ways of framing the opportunity space. The second villain is looking for evidence that confirms our beliefs.

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. Instead of falling in love with our first idea, we’ll ask, “What else could we build?” or “How else might we address this opportunity?” Visualizing your options on an opportunity solution tree will help you catch when you are asking a “whether or not” question

adapt as you go rather than slow down to analyze.

Realy?

Visualizing each decision point and the options that you considered on the opportunity solution tree will help you revisit past decisions when needed and will give you the context you need to course-correct.

the best designers evolve the problem space and the solution space together.9 As they explore potential solutions, they learn more about the problem, and, as they learn more about the problem, new solutions become possible.

When we learn through testing that an idea won’t work, it’s not enough to move on to the next idea. We need to take time to reflect. We want to ask: “Based on my current understanding of my customer, I thought this solution would work. It didn’t. What did I misunderstand about my customer?” We then need to revise our understanding of the opportunity space before moving on to new solutions.

The product trio should be responsible for both. By visually mapping out the opportunity space on an opportunity solution tree, a product trio is making their understanding of their customer explicit. When a solution fails, they can revisit this mapping to quickly revise that understanding.

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.