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January 8 - March 10, 2024
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.
They are collectively responsible for ensuring that their products create value for the customer in a way that creates value for the business.
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.
Begin With the End in Mind As our product-discovery methods evolve, we are shifting from an output mindset to an outcome mindset. 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.
In this book, I’ll refer to customer needs, pain points, and desires collectively as “opportunities”—they represent opportunities to intervene in our customers’ lives in a positive way.
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.
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.
Opportunity solution trees are a simple way of visually representing the paths you might take to reach a desired outcome. The root of the tree is your desired outcome—the business need that reflects how your team can create business value. Next is the opportunity space. These are the customer needs, pain points, and desires that, if addressed, will drive your desired outcome. Below the opportunity space is the solution space. This is where we’ll visually depict the solutions we are exploring. Below the solution space are assumption tests. This is how we’ll evaluate which solutions will help us
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For most of us, when we encounter a problem, we simply want to solve it. This desire comes from a place of good intent. We like to help people. However, this instinct often gets us into trouble. We don’t always remember to question the framing of the problem. We tend to fall in love with our first solution. We forget to ask, “How else might we solve this problem?”
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?”
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.
As a general rule, product trios will make more progress on a product outcome rather than a business outcome. Remember, product outcomes measure how well the product moves the business forward. By definition, a product outcome is within the product trio’s span of control.
To prevent groupthink, 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. This is counterintuitive. It’s going to feel inefficient. We are used to dividing and conquering, not duplicating work. But 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.
Decades of research on investigative interviewing (the kind used by journalists, lawyers, and detectives) has shown that interview participants struggle to answer direct (factual) questions accurately.22 In a witness interview, this might mean that the participant mistakes the color of the getaway car or forgets an important location. In a customer interview, this might mean that the customer misremembers when they bought something or forgets why they signed up for a particular service.
the reality is, our brains are exceptionally good at creating coherent (but not necessarily true) stories that deceive us.
As long as your brain can summon a compelling reason, it will feel like the truth—even if it isn’t.
Remember, 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.
Instead of asking, “What criteria do you use when purchasing a pair of jeans?”—a direct question that encourages our participant to speculate about their behavior—we want to ask, “Tell me about the last time you purchased a pair of jeans.” The story will help us uncover what criteria our participant used when purchasing a pair of jeans, but because the answer is situated in a specific instance (an actual time when they bought jeans), it will reflect their actual behavior, not their perceived behavior.
Thinking about their story as having a beginning, a middle, and an end can help you guide the participant.
The golden rule of interviewing is to let the participant talk about what they care about most.
Remember, a story-based interview question starts with, “Tell me about a specific time when…”
“Structure is complicated. It gets done, undone, and redone.” — Barbara Tversky, Mind in Motion
It’s easy, however, to bounce from one opportunity to the next, reacting to every need or pain point we hear about. Most product teams are devoted to serving their customers, and, when they hear about a need or a pain point, they want to solve it. But our job is not to address every customer opportunity. Our job is to address customer opportunities that drive our desired outcome.
Limiting our work to only the opportunities that might drive our desired outcome is what ensures that our products are viable over the long run and not just desirable in the moment.
“The build trap is when organizations become stuck measuring their success by outputs rather than outcomes. It’s when they focus more on shipping and developing features rather than on the actual value those things produce.” — Melissa Perri
“When people create maps of an unknowable, unpredictable world, they face strong temptations toward either overconfident knowing or overly cautious doubt. Wisdom consists of an attitude toward one’s beliefs, values, knowledge, and information that resists these temptations through an ongoing balance between knowing and doubt.” — Karl Weick
We obsess about the competition instead of about our customers.
You always want to choose a leaf-node opportunity (i.e., one that has no children) because our goal is to deliver iterative value over time.
There may not be a clear winner, and that’s okay.
When assessing and prioritizing the opportunity space, it’s important that we find the right balance between being data-informed and not getting stuck in analysis paralysis.
It’s important that we frame our discovery decisions as two-way door, reversible decisions.
Lottie Bullens and colleagues, social psychologists at the University of Amsterdam, found in a series of studies that, when people viewed a decision as reversible, they continued to critically evaluate their decision after making it.
If we want to stay open to being wrong and avoid confirmation bias, it’s critical that we think of our prioritization decisions as reversible decisions.
Make the best decision you can, given what you know today, and know that, if you got it wrong, we’ll simply revisit the decision when we need to.
As researchers dug into why individuals outperformed groups, they identified four mitigating factors. First, research has found that people tend to work harder when working individually than when working in groups. This is called social loafing. When we are on our own, we have no choice but to put in the work, whereas when we are in a group, we can rely on the efforts of others.
“the illusion of group productivity.”
This is a phenomenon in which groups overestimate their performance. They also report high levels of satisfaction with their work despite their lesser performance.
One of my favorite questions to ask teams is, “If the New York Times/Wall Street Journal/BBC (or insert your favorite news organization) ran a front-page story about this solution that included your internal conversations about how the solution would work, what data you collected, how you used it, and how different players in the ecosystem benefited or didn’t, would that be a good thing? If not, why not?”
Karl Popper, a renowned 20th-century philosopher of science, in the opening quote argues, “Good tests kill flawed theories,” preventing us from investing where there is little reward, and “we remain alive to guess again,” giving us another chance to get it right.
Here’s the key lesson. Just because the hire wasn’t happening on our platform didn’t mean it wasn’t valuable for us to measure it. We knew it was what would create value for our students, our employees, and ultimately our own business. So, we chipped away at it. We weren’t afraid to measure hard things—and you shouldn’t be, either.
“Trusting the process can give you the confidence to take risks.” — Chip and Dan Heath, Decisive
Giving up before small changes have time to add up. While you do want to measure the impact of your product changes, don’t expect to see large step-function results from every change. Oftentimes it takes a series of changes to move the needle on our outcome.
Every time they solved one problem, it opened the door to the next problem. But they kept at it and, over time, had a big impact on their desired outcome.
If your stakeholders are more senior to you, odds are their opinion is going to win. This is why we have the dreaded HiPPO acronym (the Highest Paid Person’s Opinions) and the saying “The HiPPO always wins.”
Focus on the opportunities with which you can show the benefit of working this way. Choose your battles. Don’t fight the ones you can’t win.
Instead of asking for permission or waiting for someone to show you how, start small. Iterate from there. I made a career doing that,
If you aren’t familiar with the concept of a keystone habit, it comes from Charles Duhigg’s book The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. Duhigg argues, “Keystone habits start a process that, over time, transforms everything.” They are habits that, once adopted, drive the adoption of other habits.
To be clear, it’s not that exercise makes you eat better or making your bed makes you more disciplined, but doing the former makes the latter easier. The keystone habit builds motivation for the subsequent habits.
I encourage my teams to ask, “What did we learn during this sprint that surprised us?” This could be anything from a feature release didn’t have the expected impact, we learned a new insight in a customer interview, or we ran into a feasibility hurdle that required us to redesign a solution. Make a list.
