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

Long discussion guides exist for a reason. They are easy to create, and they allow everyone to get their favorite questions answered. Unfortunately, they lead to overwhelmed interview participants and unreliable interview data. Ditch the discussion guide. Instead, generate a list of research questions (what you need to learn), and identify one or t

Our goal should be to address the customer opportunities that will have the biggest impact on our outcome first. To do this, we need to start by taking an inventory of the possibilities. In the first quote that opens this chapter, John Dewey, an American educational philosopher, encourages us to “carry on systematic and protracted inquiry.” Rather

When we assess and prioritize the opportunity space, even though these are some of the most strategic decisions we make as a product trio, we are still making two-way door decisions. When you choose a target opportunity, you are choosing how to spend your next few days or weeks. You are not committing to addressing that opportunity. You are simply

This obsession with producing outputs is strangling us. It’s why we spend countless hours prioritizing features, grooming backlogs, and micro-managing releases. The hard reality is that product strategy doesn’t happen in the solution space. Our customers don’t care about the majority of our feature releases. A solution-first mindset is good at prod

These problems get compounded when working in teams. When we hear a problem, we each individually jump to a fast solution. When we disagree, we engage in fruitless opinion battles. These opinion battles encourage us to fall back on our organizational roles and claim decision authority (e.g., the product manager has the final say), instead of collab

Relying on one person to recruit and interview participants.

Drawing the underlying structure of the stories that you hear—and, by that, I mean the nodes and the links that make up the story—will help you remember the story. It will help you better understand the story.

You might be tempted to score each opportunity based on the different factors (e.g., 2 out of 3 for sizing, 1 out of 3 for market factors, and so on) and then stack-rank your opportunities, much like you might do with features. Don’t do this. This is a messy, subjective decision, and you want to keep it that way.

This allows us to ship value quickly. Now it might not solve the bigger opportunity completely, but it does solve a smaller need completely. Once we have accomplished that, we can move on to the next small opportunity. Over time, as we continuously ship value, we’ll chip away at the larger opportunity. Eventually, we’ll have solved enough of the sm