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

by Teresa Torres

Types of Assumptions Assumptions come in all shapes and sizes. As product trios, we are primarily concerned with assumptions in the following categories:

Use Your Story Maps to Generate Assumptions

Pre-mortems, on the other hand, happen at the start of the project and are designed to suss out what could go wrong in the future.

“Imagine it’s six months in the future; your product or initiative launched, and it was a complete failure. What went wrong?”

With assumption mapping, you’ll be quickly evaluating each assumption on two dimensions. I recommend you start with assessing “How much do we know about this assumption?” In other words, what evidence do we already have that tells us this assumption is true or false? If we have a lot of evidence that it’s true, then we would place the assumption on the left side of the x-axis. If we have very little evidence, we would place it on the right side of the x-axis.

We forget to clearly define what we are trying to learn and what success looks like, leaving us with ambiguous results.

To avoid this situation, we want to get specific with our evaluation criteria. Instead of saying, “Some people choose sports,” we want to say, “At least 3 out of 10 people choose sports.” We want to define both how many people we’ll test with and how many people need to exhibit the behavior that we expect to see.

So how do we choose the numbers? This is a subjective decision. Your goal is to find the right balance between speed of testing and what aligns your team around an actionable outcome. You want to test your assumption with as few people as possible (as it will be faster) but with the number of people that still gives your team the information they need to act on the data.

Researchers call this triangulation.52 It’s using a mix of research methods to better understand the assumption we are testing.

So, while we want to adopt a scientific mindset and we want to think about the reliability and the validity of the data that we collect, we are not running scientific experiments.

Our goal as a product team is not to seek truth but to mitigate risk.

However, we still need to learn how to quickly execute our assumption tests. There are two tools that should be in every product team’s toolbox—unmoderated user testing and one-question surveys.

If you want to do a deep dive on qualitative tests, pick up a copy of Laura Klein’s UX for Lean Startups. She does a good job of surveying a wide breadth of methods. Another great reference is David Bland’s Testing Business Ideas.

Qual disco tests

The key in both examples is to remember to track the long-term connection between your product outcome and your business outcome.

This is why we have the dreaded HiPPO acronym (the Highest Paid Person’s Opinions) and the saying “The HiPPO always wins.” Many product trios complain about the HiPPO but miss the role they play in creating this situation.

When meeting with stakeholders, start at the top of your tree. Remind your stakeholders what your desired outcome is. Ask them if anything has changed since you last agreed to this outcome. This sets the scope for the conversation.

SHaring my work

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.

What does this stakeholder, in particular, need to know?

Build Your Trio

“Keystone habits start a process that, over time, transforms everything.” They are habits that, once adopted, drive the adoption of other habits.

When product teams engage with their customers week over week, they don’t just get the benefit of interviewing more often—they also start rapid prototyping and experimenting more often.