Continuous Discovery Habits

How do you know that you are making a product or service that your customers want? How do you ensure that you are improving over time? How do you guarantee that your team is creating value for your customers in a way that creates value for your business?

Discovery isn't a one-time activity. A digital product is never done. It can and should continue to evolve.

Discovery is done by the product "trio" (it could include more people depending on the product): Product, Design and Engineering. They are collectively responsible for ensuring that their products create value for the customer in a way that creates value for the business.

When a product trio is tasked with delivering an outcome, the business is clearly communicating what value the team can create for the business. And when the business leaves it up to the team to explore the best outputs that might drive that outcome, they are giving the team the latitude they need to create value for the customer.

Finding the best path to your desired outcome is what researchers call an "ill-structured problem" (or "wicked problem"). Ill-structured problems are defined by having many solutions. There are no right or wrong answers, only better or worse ones. How we frame a problem has a big impact on how we might solve it.

e.g. "grow customers accounts at all costs" vs "create customers who want to open more accounts"

Opportunities represent customer needs, pain points and desires collectively. The opportunity space represents the problem space as well as the desire space.

Two most important steps for reaching our desired outcome:

1. How we map out and structure the opportunity space
2. How we select which opportunities to pursue

A simple way of visually representing the paths you might take to reach a desired outcome.

When we manage by outcomes we give our teams the autonomy, responsibility and ownership to chart their own path. A fixed roadmap communicates false certainty. An outcome communicates uncertainty: "We know we need this problem solved, but we don't know the best way to solve it".

Different types of outcomes:

Business outcomes are often lagging indicators. They measure something after it happened, putting teams in react mode. Product trios will make more progress on a product outcome rather than a business outcome because it's within the product trio's span of control.

Outcomes are the result of a two-way negotiation between the product leader and the product trio. Teams who participate in setting their own outcomes take more initiative and perform better.

Four categories of outcome-setting:

1. Asked to deliver outputs with no outcomes
2. Product leaders set outcomes with little input
3. Product trio sets outcomes with little input from leader
4. Product trio negotiates outcomes with leaders ✓

Four habits to discover, structure and prioritize the opportunity space:

1. Build an experience map that reflects what you currently know about the customer
2. Interview customers to discover specific opportunities, capture on interview snapshots
3. Map out and structure opportunities on an opportunity solution tree
4. Use the tree structure to assess and prioritize

These artifacts are not one-time activities. They evolve as your understanding evolves.

When working with an outcome for the first time, map out your customers' experience as it exists today.

Setting the scope:

Think strategically about how broad or narrow to set the scope. For Netflix with "increase average minutes watched":

• Too broad: "How do customers entertain themselves today?"
• Too narrow: "How do customers entertain themselves using our service?"
• Just right: "How do customers entertain themselves with video?"

Process:

1. Start individually to avoid groupthink
2. Experience maps are visual, not verbal
3. Don't focus on your product, draw the experience of your customer
4. Co-create a shared experience map (synthesize, don't choose the best)
5. Turn individual maps into nodes and links
6. Collapse similar nodes, determine links
7. Don't just map the happy path — map frustrations, loops
8. Add context: what was the user thinking, feeling, doing?

Anti-patterns:

• Getting bogged down in endless debate (draw differences instead)
• Using words instead of visuals
• Moving forward as if your map is true
• Forgetting to refine and evolve your map

We can't always rely on our customers to tell us what they need. We need to use our customers' own stories to discover their unmet needs.

The challenge with asking people what they need:

"What factors do you consider when buying jeans?" → "Fit is my number one factor"
"Tell me about the last time you bought jeans" → "I bought them on Amazon... they were a brand I liked and on sale"

Their first response tells us how they think they buy. Their second response tells us how they actually bought. Participants aren't lying — we just aren't very good at understanding our own behavior.

Distinguish research questions from interview questions:

Research questions = what you are trying to learn
Interview questions = what you ask in the interview

Primary research question: "What needs, pain points, and desires matter most to this customer?"

The best way to learn about needs, pain points, and desires is to ask them to share specific stories about their experience: "Tell me about the last time you bought a pair of jeans."

Excavate the story:

• Use temporal prompts: What happened first? Where were you? What happened before that?
• Use your experience map to track the story
• Ask about nodes that were left out
• Guide them back when they generalize: "In this specific instance did you face that challenge?"

A one-pager designed to help you synthesize what you learned in a single interview.

Interview every week.

If you stop interviewing and need to change course, you'll have to start from scratch. Interviewing is not a step in a linear process — it's continuous.

Interview together, act together.

The whole product trio should interview, not only the researcher or PM.

Anti-patterns:

• Relying on one person to recruit and interview
• Asking who, what, why, how and when questions instead of story-based questions
• Interviewing only when you think you need it
• Sharing pages of notes instead of snapshots
• Stopping to synthesize a set of interviews

Mapping the opportunity is how we give structure to the ill-structured problem of reaching our desired outcome.

Trees depict two key relationships: parent-child and sibling relationships.

e.g. "I'm out of episodes of my favorite show" might be a child of "I can't find anything to watch"

For each opportunity, ask:

1. Is this framed as a customer need, pain point, or desire (not solution)?
2. Is this unique to this customer, or have we seen it in more than one interview?
3. If we address this, will it drive our desired outcome?

"Structure is done, undone and redone."

Anti-patterns:

• Opportunities framed from your company's perspective
• Vertical opportunities (parent with one child with one child...)
• Opportunities have multiple parent opportunities (too broad)
• Opportunities are not specific (e.g. "This is too hard")
• Opportunities are solutions in disguise
• Capturing feelings as opportunities (look for the cause instead)

Our customers care about solving their needs, pain points and desires. Product Strategy happens in the opportunity space. Strategy emerges from the decisions we make about which outcomes to pursue, customers to serve, and opportunities to address.

Focus on one target opportunity at a time. Compare and contrast the set of parent opportunities against each other.

Assessing a set of opportunities:

• Opportunity sizing — How many customers are affected and how often?
• Market factors — Macro trends, competition, differentiators
• Company factors — Vision, mission, strategic objectives, constraints, team skills
• Customer factors — Prioritize important opportunities where satisfaction with current solution is low

Remember, most decisions are two-way doors.

Anti-patterns:

• Delaying a decision until there is more data
• Over-relying on one set of factors at the cost of others
• Working backwards from your expected conclusion

Researchers measure creativity using three criteria: fluency (number of ideas), flexibility (diversity), and originality (novelty). As we generate more ideas, diversity and novelty increase.

Steps:

1. Review your target opportunity (make sure everyone understands it)
2. Generate ideas alone
3. Share ideas across your team
4. Repeat until you've generated 15-20 ideas

Your first ideas are rarely your best ideas.

Evaluating ideas:

Filter ideas that don't solve the target opportunity. Then dot-vote to get to your top three.

Anti-patterns:

• Not including diverse perspectives
• Generating too many variations of the same idea
• Limiting ideation to one session
• Selecting ideas that don't address the target opportunity

Types of assumptions:

• Desirability — Does anyone want it? Will customers get value from it?
• Viability — Should we build it? Will it create enough value for the business?
• Feasibility — Can we build it?
• Usability — Is it usable? Accessible?
• Ethical — Is there potential harm in building this?

Story map to get clarity:

1. Start by assuming the solution already exists
2. Identify the key actors (who needs to interact?)
3. Map out the steps each actor has to take for anyone to get value
4. Sequence the steps horizontally over time

Example assumptions from "Our subscriber comes to our platform to watch sports":

• Desirability: our subscriber wants to watch sports
• Desirability: our subscriber wants to watch sports on our platform
• Usability: our subscriber knows they can watch sports on our platform
• Usability: our subscriber thinks of our platform when it's time to watch sports
• Feasibility: Our platform is available when our subscriber wants to watch sports

Prioritizing assumptions:

Identify "leaps of faith" — those carry the most risk. Map assumptions in 2D: X = "How much do we know?", Y = "How important is this to success?". Start testing the assumption in the top-right corner.

Anti-patterns:

• Not generating enough assumptions (20-30 per idea minimum)
• Phrasing assumptions such that you need them to be false
• Not being specific enough
• Favoring one category at the cost of others

Simulate an experience, evaluate the behavior. We are trying to get early signals for assumptions and comparing between opportunities and solutions. We won't be 100% sure, but we'll be more confident to build more expensive testing solutions like A/B tests.

Anti-patterns:

• Overly complex simulations
• Using percentages instead of specific numbers (e.g. "70%" vs "7 out of 10 users we interviewed")
• Not defining enough evaluation criteria
• Testing with the wrong audience
• Designing for less than best-case scenario

As experiments grow, you'll need to test with a real audience, in a real context, with real data. Testing in production is where your delivery work begins. If you instrument your delivery work, delivery will feed discovery.

Don't measure everything.

Instrument your evaluation criteria. e.g. "Students will view jobs that we recommended" → "At least 63 out of 500 students will view at least one job" → track # of people who viewed at least one job.

Anti-patterns:

• Getting stuck trying to measure everything
• Hyperfocusing on assumption tests and forgetting to walk the tree
• Forgetting to test the connection between product outcome and business outcome