When a team takes the time to visualize their options, they build a shared understanding of how they might reach their desired outcome. If they maintain this visual as they learn week over week, they maintain that shared understanding, allowing them to collaborate over time. We know this collaboration is critical to product success.

Opportunities are not specific. Opportunities that represent themes, design guidelines, or even sentiment, aren’t specific enough. “I wish this was easy to use,” “This is too hard,” and “I want to do everything on the go” are not good opportunities. However, if we make them more specific, they can become good opportunities: “I wish finding a show t

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.

Good discovery doesn’t prevent us from failing; it simply reduces the chance of failures. Failures will still happen. However, we can’t be afraid of failure. Product trios need to move forward and act on what…

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Bernard Nijstad and colleagues at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands found that brainstorming groups are subject to what they call “the illusion of group productivity.”40 This is a phenomenon in which groups overestimate their performance. They also report high levels of satisfaction with their work despite their lesser performance.

An opportunity represents a need, a pain point, or a desire that was expressed during the interview. Be sure to represent opportunities as needs and not solutions.

Ping-ponging from one outcome to another. Because many businesses have developed fire-fighting cultures—where every customer complaint is treated like a crisis—it’s common for product trios to…

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Finding the best path to your desired outcome is what researchers call an “ill-structured problem”—also commonly called a “wicked problem.” Ill-structured problems are defined by having many solutions. There are no right or wrong answers, only better or worse ones.

Prioritizing Assumptions