Continuous Discovery Habits

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Todays Book

Continuous Discovery Habits
By Teresa Torres

Summary Snapshot

In "Continuous Discovery Habits," Teresa Torres offers a new way to manage products by focusing on ongoing discovery and delivery. She suggests that product teams frequently interact with customers to ensure products meet their needs, using their feedback to guide decisions. Torres provides a simple process for including discovery in product development, helping teams create products that truly satisfy customers and avoid mistakes.

• Continuous Discovery is Crucial: Discovery should not be a one-off event but an ongoing process. Integrating continuous discovery into product development helps teams keep up with shifting customer needs, avoid working on features that don’t add value, and ensure the product aligns with user expectations.

• Discovery vs. Delivery: While delivery focuses on creating and shipping the product, discovery focuses on understanding the customers' needs. Product teams should balance both to avoid delivering products that may be technically sound but fail to meet actual customer demands.

• Weekly Customer Engagement: Teams should engage with customers weekly, not sporadically. Regular customer feedback helps teams stay aligned with real needs, adjust quickly to market changes, and maintain the relevance of their product offerings.

• Opportunity Solution Tree (OST): This visual tool helps teams plan and manage discovery efforts. It starts with the desired outcome and branches into opportunities (customer needs) and potential solutions, helping teams prioritize actions based on customer value and strategic alignment.

• Focusing on Outcomes, Not Outputs: Outcomes are the value provided to customers, while outputs are the product features. Focusing on outcomes ensures that teams are aligned with customer satisfaction and long-term goals, rather than just pushing features that may not matter.

• Identify the Right End Goal: Before diving into discovery, clearly define the end goal. Use the OST to ensure that all discovery efforts work toward creating value, not just completing tasks. This goal-setting aligns teams and helps prioritize activities based on their potential impact.

• Learn from Customer Stories: Traditional surveys may not uncover deeper insights. Torres advocates for story-based interviewing, where customers share specific, recent experiences to help uncover hidden needs and behaviors. This approach can reveal unspoken pain points and biases.

• Story Bias Awareness: Customers often misremember or distort their experiences. Be aware of biases like recency bias, where recent events are overemphasized, or choice-supportive bias, where customers remember their choices more positively than they were in reality.

• Brainstorming Multiple Solutions: Rather than settling on the first solution, teams should brainstorm a wide array of ideas. The more solutions generated, the higher the likelihood of finding the most effective, creative solutions to customer problems.

• Individual and Group Brainstorming: Start by brainstorming individually to generate diverse ideas, then share and refine these ideas in group sessions. This method fosters both creativity and collaboration, ensuring the best ideas come forward.

• Assumptions are Risks: Every product decision is based on assumptions, and these assumptions can lead to failure if not examined. It’s critical to identify assumptions early—whether about desirability, feasibility, or usability—and test them rigorously.

• Desirability Assumptions: These assumptions are about whether customers want the solution. Testing desirability helps prevent developing features that customers may not value or need, saving time and resources.

• Viability Assumptions: These address whether the solution makes business sense. It’s essential to validate whether a solution is financially viable and aligns with the company’s strategic goals before investing heavily in its development.

• Feasibility Assumptions concern whether the solution is technically and organizationally achievable. Assessing whether the team has the resources, skills, and capabilities to build a solution is key to successful product development.

• Usability assumptions examine whether customers can easily use the solution. Testing usability early on ensures that products are user-friendly and meet customer expectations regarding ease of use and functionality.

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• Ethical Assumptions: Consider the solution's potential harms, whether intentional or unintended. Ethical assumptions ensure that the product does not cause harm or lead to negative consequences for customers or society.

• Story Mapping to Uncover Assumptions: Use story mapping to identify assumptions at each step of the user journey. By laying out the interactions needed for a customer to gain value from a solution, teams can uncover hidden assumptions and address them before they lead to failure.

• Prioritize Testing Assumptions: Start by testing the most critical assumptions that carry the highest risk. Torres recommends using a tool like the assumption slam model to prioritize which assumptions to test based on their potential impact.

• Simulate Customer Experiences: To validate assumptions, simulate real customer experiences. Observing customers' behavior in a controlled, realistic setting provides valuable data on whether assumptions hold true in practice.

• Small-Scale Tests: Before scaling up, begin testing with small, low-cost experiments. These tests minimize risk and allow teams to adjust based on real-world feedback, ensuring that product decisions are grounded in evidence.

• Testing with Real Data: Testing assumptions through simulations or small experiments provides real-world insights. Torres advises teams to gather actionable, real data rather than hypothetical responses, which helps make more informed decisions.

• Iterative Discovery and Delivery: Discovery and delivery should not be siloed processes. Torres emphasizes that they are deeply intertwined, with insights from discovery informing delivery work, and real-world feedback from delivery influencing further discovery.

• Feedback Loops: Continuous feedback is key to successful discovery and delivery. Teams should constantly gather input from customers, stakeholders, and data to refine the product and its features over time.

• Vanity Metrics vs. Value Metrics: Avoid relying on vanity metrics (like total downloads or page views) that don’t reflect real product value. Instead, focus on metrics that track meaningful customer engagement or behavior that directly ties to the product’s success.

• Map Value Streams: Use value stream mapping to visualize where your product creates value for customers and identify pain points. This will help you focus discovery efforts on improving areas that will most impact the customer experience.

• Integrating Discovery into Daily Work: Make discovery a weekly habit for the entire product team. Regular customer interviews, user testing, and data analysis, should be integrated into the team’s ongoing work to ensure that customer needs are continuously understood and addressed.

• Customer-Centered Decision Making: Constantly put the customer at the center of product decisions. Continuous discovery practices ensure that product decisions are based on customer feedback, not just assumptions or internal priorities.

• Focus on Customer Needs: Successful product development starts with truly understanding customer needs. Discovery practices help teams identify and prioritize these needs, leading to products that truly resonate with customers.

• Adapt and Revise Based on Learning: Discovery is an iterative process. As teams learn more about their customers and their assumptions, they must be willing to adapt and revise their strategies, ensuring that the product remains aligned with evolving needs.

• Long-Term Commitment to Discovery: Continuous discovery is not a short-term fix but a long-term commitment. Teams that embrace this habit will build better products, create stronger customer relationships, and stay ahead of the competition by consistently meeting customer expectations.

What’s Next?

Start integrating continuous discovery into your product development process today. Commit to weekly customer engagement, test your assumptions, and ensure your solutions are rooted in real customer needs. By making discovery a consistent practice, you’ll be better equipped to deliver products that truly meet customer demands and drive success.

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