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

by Teresa Torres

To shift your outcome from less of an output to more of an outcome, question the impact it will have.

In addition to your primary outcome, a team needs to monitor health metrics to ensure they aren’t causing detrimental effects elsewhere.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean one team is focused on both acquisition and satisfaction at the same time. It means their goal is to increase acquisition without negatively impacting satisfaction.

three key artifacts that will help you build a shared understanding as you work to discover the best path to your desired outcome.

start by building an experience map that reflects what you currently know about your customer

Your experience map will guide you as you interview customers to discover specific opportunities. You’ll capture what you are learning from ...

You’ll map out and structure those opportunities on an opport...

and use the tree structure to help you assess and prioritize t...

to chart the best path to a desired outcome, you need to discover and map out the opportunity space. However, the opportunity space is infinite. You can’t just dive in. You’ll quickly get lost. To make sense of the opportunity space, we first need to take an inventory of what we already know.

When working with an outcome for the first time, it can feel overwhelming to know where to start. It helps to first map out your customers’ experience as it exists today.

Once they had each created their individual map, they took the time to explore each other’s perspectives.

Each map represented a unique perspective—together they represented a much richer understanding of the opportunity space they intended to explore. The trio quickly worked to merge their unique perspectives into a shared experience map that better reflected what they collectively knew. Their map wasn’t set in stone. They knew that it contained hunches and possibilities, not truth. But it gave them a clear starting point. They had made explicit what they thought they knew, where they had open questions, and what they needed to vet in their upcoming customer interviews.

This chapter will teach you how to use your desired outcome as a starting point to work your way—first individually, and then as a team—to an experience map that reflects what you know about your customers’ experience today. You’ll learn to visualize your own perspective, explore the perspectives of your teammates, and then use the myriad of perspectives to co-create a shared team understanding. This shared map will guide your customer interviews, and it will help give structure to the opportunity space. It can and should evolve week over week as your team learns about your customers.

Set the Scope of Your Exp...

To get started, you’ll want to first set the scope of yo...

start with your desired outcome.

“What’s preventing our customers from completing their application today?” Their outcome constrained what they tried to capture.

Think strategically about how broad or narrow to set the scope. When a team is focused on an optimization outcome, like increasing application submissions, it’s fine to define the scope narrowly. However, when working on a more open-ended outcome, you’ll want to expand the scope of your experience map.

There’s not one right scope. The key is to have a conversation as a team about the scope that gives you room to explore while staying focused on your outcome.

Once you’ve defined the scope of your experience map, you are ready to take an inventory of your individual knowledge before working to develop a shared understanding of what you collectively know.

Start Individually to Avoid...

it’s common for some members to put in more effort than others; some group members may hesitate or even refrain from speaking up, and groups tend to perform at the level of the least-capable member.

it’s critical that each member of the trio start by developing their own perspective before the trio works together to develop a shared perspective.

in instances where it’s important that we explore multiple perspectives, the easiest way to get there is for each product-trio member to do the work individually.

Experience Maps Are Visual, Not Verbal

drawing is a critical thinking aid that you will want to tap into. Drawing allows us to externalize our thinking, which, in turn, helps us examine that thinking.

it’s easier to see gaps in our thinking, to catch what’s missing, and to correct what’s not quite right.

You can draw boxes and arrows, stick figures, and squiggly shapes that mean something only to you.

visualize your thinking so that you can examine it.

Start with the scope of your exp...

“What’s preventing our customers from completing the a...

“How do consumers entertain themselve...

don’t focus on your product. Instead, draw the experience...

think about the broader context.

As you get started, you are going to be tempted to describe this context with words. Don’t. Language is vague. It’s easy for two people to think they are in agreement over the course of a conversation, but, still, each might walk away with a different perspective. Drawing is more specific. It forces you to be concrete. You can’t draw something specific if you haven’t taken the time to get clear on what those specifics are. Your goal during this exercise is to do the work to understand what you know,

Once each member of your trio has taken the time to inventory what they know, it’s time to explore the diverse perspectives on your team. Explore the Diverse Perspectives on Your Team

ask questions to make sure you fully understand their point of view. Give them time and space to clarify what they think and why they think it. Don’t worry about what they got right or wrong (from your perspective). Instead, pay particular attention to the differences.

When it’s your turn to share, don’t advocate for your drawing. Simply share your point of view, answer questions, and clarify your thinking.

Once you have a clear understanding of each team member’s perspective, you are ready to start building a shared team perspective.

Co-Create a Shared Experience Map

synthesizing your work together rather than choosing the “best” drawing

Start by turning each of your individual maps into a collection of nodes and links. A node is a distinct moment in time, an action, or an event, while links are what connect nodes together.

Create a new map that includes all of your individual nodes.

Many of your individual maps will include overlapping nodes. Feel free to collapse similar nodes together. However, be careful. Make sure you are collapsing like items and not generalizing so much that you lose key detail.

Determine the links between each node. Use arrows to show the flow through the nodes.

Add context. Once you have a map that represents the nodes and links of your customer’s journey, add context to each step. What are they thinking, feeling, and doing at each step of the journey? Try to capture this context visually. It will help the team (and your stakeholders) synthesize what you know,

We often debate details when we already agree. We just don’t realize we already agree. When you are forced to draw an idea, you have to get specific enough to define what it is. This often helps to quickly clear up the disagreement or to pinpoint exactly where the disagreement occurs.

use boxes and arrows. Remember, you don’t have to create a piece of art. Stick figures and smiley faces are perfectly okay.

Remember, this is your first draft, intended to capture what you think you know about your customer. We’ll test this understanding in our customer interviews and again when we start to explore solutions.

as you discover more about your customer, you’ll want to make sure that you continue to hone and refine this map as a team.