Enlightening the Product & Continuous Discovery (part I)
How do you sense?
For the past year, I’ve been extensive research on Discovery. Despite my practicing in the field for a reasonable amount of time, the market is everchanging, and users become more and more aware of what they want. Product teams have to sense, adapt, and respond quickly to new behaviors and necessities. As professionals, we must keep learning how to improve our work and how to deliver results with increased value.
“In a world of continuous learning and real-time response, we can always continue to improve.” (Sense & Respond by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden)
Many frameworks and methodologies have been teaching us how to perform a successful Discovery. I manage different approaches for each unique situation I encounter. I have previously described here how to use Design Thinking in Agile projects. Methods from product experts, for example, Jeff Patton, Jeff Gothelf, Marty Cagan, and Teresa Torres.
Being a Product Manager, I aspire to a more efficient path to fail fast and learn fast, which means embracing a more compelling user validation. Or in Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden’s words: sense user necessities and respond to it quickly. So I started to dig deeper. I read countless books and articles, talked to different professionals. And it got me thinking: What could I do to complement existing frameworks? How to put in practice what these experts have taught me?
By no means do I have the intention to reinvent the wheel. This article has as a goal to outline steps of a Product & Continuous Discovery model, that I’ve been seeking to make it straight to the point. You will see that I used particular concepts from product experts above to scope it. Mainly because I hope it complements other’s workflows.
I’ve organized this series of articles to enlight you regarding the Product & Continuous Discovery. And for that, I’ve used real-life examples based on my current work.
Desired Outcome
Outcome overcomes outputs. That means targeting an objective instead of different results. You can find the desired outcome in the OKRs as Key Results, part of the company’s goals, in the market, or a user’s necessity. It is essential to have a target to focus your efforts.
My personal goal is to improve engagement in a two-way conversation, which means develop Discovery in a more straight forward way listening to users and getting back to them. I wasn’t feeling satisfied with the latest discoveries that I have performed. We had user validation phases, and we had successfully worked as a team, the workshop itself provided outstanding results. However, I knew it could be better.
Product development is not complicated.
Opportunity Solution Tree
If you don’t know what “Opportunity Solution Tree” is, I highly recommend reading Teresa Torres’s article. It’s very insightful, and a must-read if you want to gain a greater understanding of the topic.
This framework helps organize our line of thoughts based on the desired outcome and identify opportunities to address that outcome.
Encounter opportunities in the business, market, from users to team members. Identify if it is feasible, usable, and desirable, raise possible risks and answered these questions from Product Opportunity Assessment by Marty Cagan. It will help you prevent working on something pointless and allow you to identify the steps to succeed.
Based on my desired outcome stated above, I have brainstormed opportunities that would guarantee my goal. And I came up with the following two:
Execute Product & Continuous Discovery in a more objective and straightforward way
That’s a fact! I needed to review the way I was pulling of discoveries. It’s been a fun learning journey, and I got to a point where I had to provide my teammates with the directions of a more user-centered product development.
> Product Opportunity Assessment:
1. Exactly what problem will this solve? The practice of discovery principles.
2. For whom do we solve that problem? For users that will access better products thought carefully about them.
3. How big is the opportunity? Company-wide.
4. What alternatives are out there? There are many models, frameworks, and methodologies in the market, each one has its value and can be used together or complemented.
5. Why are we best suited to pursue this? Opportunity to improve how we deliver value.
6. Why now? It’s never too late for a change.
7. How will we get this product to market? As soon as possible.
8. How will we measure success/make money from this product? Follow metrics of projects that are adopting this model, team performance, and user validation feedback.
9. What factors are critical to success? Bottom-up decision-making autonomy, executives open to fail fast, teams learn from it and respond quickly. It’s a mindset change.
10. Given the above, what’s the recommendation? Go.
> Risks: Receive ideas ready to develop.
Empathy Map Workshops
Another accountable opportunity would be performing an empathy map and understand user’s pains and necessities to pursue proper ideas. (I won’t get into too many details on this one).
Considering the current scenario, I have decided to go with the first opportunity based on my plan.
You can use different techniques to prioritize an opportunity. Sometimes I use Kano Model or MoSCoW, and so on.
The next step of the Tree is ideate solutions that would help me address the opportunity. Talking with a few people, I considered the following:
Combine Design Thinking and Design Sprint
While Richard (team’s Product Design) and I were planning the Product Discovery for a new feature, we decided to combine these two methodologies.
Even though I was struggling to boost the discovery practice, I wanted to give it a try. Maybe it would be too much to do with a team that hasn’t done any of it before. We had to evaluate and check.
They are very similar methodologies, but actually, it turned out to be extremely valuable and valid to the second solution (more details to come).
In the usual case working in a product development scenario, you will have many solutions that team members and stakeholders will provide. To prioritize them, Teresa Torres suggests the technique Compare & Contrast doing collaboratively.
To continue the process, with the solution in mind, I went to the experiment phase:
In the next article, I will explain how you can perform a discovery in practice. Keep up for the second part, coming shortly! :)
(Please notice that I’m not native in English and I apologize for mistakes)
