Continuous Discovery Habits_ Discover Products That Create Customer Value and Business Value

We shifted away from having lists of metrics to increase and outputs to deliver. Now we have fewer goals, more clarity, and a focus on solving the customer’s problem in ways that drive business value.

We shifted away from falling in love with a single idea and building it. Now we come up with many ideas. And we learn faster by testing sets of ideas and running smaller simulations.

We shifted away from discovery and delivery being separate responsibilities. Now there’s more collaboration, with most of the team involved in customer interviews, mapping the customer journey, ideating on solutions, and discussing results. The whole team contributes at key points along the way, and we learn and adjust our course together.

Many work in organizations where the leaders have not had a chance to see how good product teams work up close. And as such, they’re unable to effectively coach and develop their people.

I was tired of having to convince my colleagues that a relentless focus on customers was a better strategy than obsessing about our competitors. Sadly, this is the work of a product executive.

Companies fell into the trap of chasing the next sale or obsessing about their competitors because many companies (especially startups) didn’t have a better model for product management. They didn’t know what good looked like.

My goal with this book is to share those habits with you in the hopes that you, too, will be inspired to spend more time with your customers. The world needs better products. It’s up to us to make that happen. This book will teach you how.

I’ll refer to the work that you do to decide what to build as discovery and the work that you do to build and ship a product as delivery.

Many companies put a heavy emphasis on delivery—they focus on whether you shipped what you said you would on time and on budget—while underinvesting in discovery, forgetting to assess if you built the right stuff. This book aims to correct for that imbalance.

Teams learned after the product shipped that customers weren’t excited about what they built. This way of working led to a lot of waste. Sadly, I still meet many teams and companies that work this way. Marty Cagan refers to these types of teams as delivery teams.

The authors of the Agile manifesto advocated for shorter cycles with more frequent customer feedback. Second, they proposed working at a pace that could be sustained continuously, rather than furiously scurrying from one milestone to another. Third, they advocated for maximum flexibility—having the ability to adapt to customer feedback quickly and easily. And fourth, they advocated for simplicity. They were concerned with how much of what they built was never used or offered limited value and instead advocated for teams to ruthlessly limit what they built.

As you read this book, if you choose to be more inclusive of who engages with these habits, just know that inclusion comes at a cost. The more folks involved in each decision, the longer it will take to reach that decision. You want to balance speed of decision-making with inclusiveness. For most teams, their trio needs to consist of at least a product manager, designer, and software engineer.

Outcome-oriented: The first mindset is both a mindset and a habit. The mindset requires that you start thinking in outcomes rather than outputs. That means rather than defining your success by the code that you ship (your output), you define success as the value that code creates for your customers and for your business (the outcomes).

Customer-centric: The second mindset places the customer at the center of our world. It requires that we not lose sight of the fact (even though many companies have) that the purpose of business is to create and serve a customer. We elevate customer needs to be on par with business needs and focus on creating customer value as well as business value.

Visual: The fourth mindset encourages us to step beyond the comfort of spoken and written language and to tap into our immense power as spatial thinkers. The habits in this book will encourage you to draw, to externalize your thinking, and to map what you know. Cognitive psychologists have shown in study after study that human beings have an immense capacity for spatial reasoning.3 The habits in this book will help you tap into that capacity.

Experimental: The fifth mindset encourages you to don your scientificthinking hat. Many of us may not have scientific training, but, to do discovery well, we need to learn to think like scientists identifying assumptions and gathering evidence.

“Managers must convert society’s needs into opportunities for profitable business.” — Peter Drucker

“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” — Albert Einstein

While Wells Fargo’s fraud is exceptional, the focus on outcomes at the cost of the customer is not uncommon. At many companies, there is a tension between business needs and customer needs. When you get bombarded with a handful of ads before you can start reading a newspaper article, it’s because the newspaper prioritized their need for ad revenue over the reader’s need for a pleasant reading experience.

As our product-discovery methods evolve, we are shifting from an output mindset to an outcome mindset. Rather than obsessing about features (outputs), we are shifting our focus to the impact those features have on both our customers and our business (outcomes). Starting with outcomes, rather than outputs, is what lays the foundation for product success.

At a minimum, weekly touchpoints with customers By the team building the product Where they conduct small research activities In pursuit of a desired outcome

To reach their desired outcome, a product trio must discover and explore the opportunity space. The opportunity space, however, is infinite. This is precisely what makes reaching our desired outcome an ill-structured problem. How the team defines and structures the opportunity space is exactly how they give structure to the ill-structured problem of reaching their desired outcome

It starts with defining a clear outcome—one that sets the scope for discovery. From there, we must discover and map out the opportunity space—this is what gives structure to the ill-structured problem of reaching our desired outcome. It’s the all-important problem framing that opens up the solution space. And finally, we need to discover the solutions that will address those opportunities and thus drive our desired outcome.

solution space. This is where we’ll visually depict the solutions we are exploring.

Assumption tests. This is how we’ll evaluate which solutions will help us best create customer value in a way that drives business value.

The team should explore the customer needs, pain points, and desires that, if addressed, would drive that outcome. The key here is that the team is filtering the opportunity space by considering only the opportunities that have the potential to drive the business need. By mapping the opportunity space, the team is adopting a customer-centric framing for how they might reach their outcome.

A continuous mindset requires that we deliver value every sprint. We create customer value by addressing unmet needs, resolving pain points, and satisfying desires.

Chip and Dan Heath, in their book Decisive, outline four villains of decisionmaking that lead to poor decisions. The first villain is looking too narrowly at a problem. This is exactly why we want to explore multiple ways of framing the opportunity space. The second villain is looking for evidence that confirms our beliefs. This is commonly known as confirmation bias. We’ll be discussing this bias often throughout the book. We’ll be exploring several habits that will help us overcome this bias and ensure that we are considering both confirming and disconfirming evidence. The third villain is letting our short-term emotions affect our decisions. In the product world, this often shows up when we fall in love with our ideas. The fourth villain is overconfidence. This, too, is common in the product world. We are often sure our ideas will be runaway successes.

The depth and breadth of the opportunity space reflects the team’s current understanding of their target customer. If our opportunity space is too shallow, it can guide us to do more customer interviews.

When it comes to sharing work with stakeholders, product trios tend to make two common mistakes. First, they share too much information—entire interview recordings or pages and pages of notes without any synthesis—expecting stakeholders to do the discovery work with them. Or second, they share too little of what they are learning, only highlighting their conclusions, often cherry-picking the research that best supports those conclusions.

Business outcomes into product outcomes you can deliver, negotiate appropriate product outcomes with your leadership team, and determine when to set learning goals versus performance goals.

A fixed roadmap communicates false certainty. It says we know these are the right features to build, even though we know from experience their impact will likely fall short. An outcome communicates uncertainty. It says, We know we need this problem solved, but we don’t know the best way to solve it. It gives the product trio the latitude they need to explore and pivot when needed. If the product trio finds flaws with their initial solution, they can quickly shift to a new idea, often trying several before they ultimately find what will drive the desired outcome.

Outcome. Finally, managing by outcomes communicates to the team how they should be measuring success.

Teams also need continuous feedback on their progress toward their goal, supporting the argument that goals should be measurable.

More recent research on goal setting involving more complex tasks, like the ones product trios face, found that challenging goals can decrease performance if the team doesn’t have strategies for how to achieve their goal.

Additionally, these studies found that setting an initial learning goal (e.g., discover the strategies that might work) was more effective than setting a performance goal. Only once appropriate strategies were identified did performance increase with a specific, challenging performance goal.

Try to connect the dots between the business outcome and potential product outcomes. Can you clearly define how this new initiative will impact a product outcome? Is that outcome a leading indicator of the lagging indicator, business outcome?

Most teams will have more of an impact by focusing on one outcome at a time.

However, you’ve already learned that it takes time to learn how to impact a new outcome. When we ping-pong from outcome to outcome, we never reap the benefits of this learning curve. Instead, set an outcome for your team, and focus on it for a few quarters.

In addition to your primary outcome, a team needs to monitor health metrics to ensure they aren’t causing detrimental effects elsewhere. For example, customer-acquisition goals are often paired with customer-satisfaction metrics to ensure that we aren’t acquiring unhappy customers. To be clear, this doesn’t mean one team is focused on both acquisition and satisfaction at the same time. It means their goal is to increase acquisition without negatively impacting satisfaction.

Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page. — Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, in Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs.

“Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.”

That’s our job. That’s what Jobs meant when he said, “Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.” We are the inventors, not our customers. However, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be talking to our customers. In this chapter, you will learn why interviewing on a regular cadence is critical to the success of any product trio and how to build a habit of interviewing weekly. The purpose of customer interviewing is not to ask your customers what you should build. Instead, the purpose of an interview is to discover and explore opportunities. Remember, opportunities are customer needs, pain points, and desires. They are opportunities to intervene in your customers’ lives in a positive way.

Direct questions require that we recall facts without context. This process is prone to cognitive biases—common patterns in mental errors that result from the way our brains process information. We are bad at quantifying how often we do something. We often speculate about what we did, when, and why. We tend to favor generalities over specifics. We give answers that are influenced more by our sense of identity rather than our actual behavior. And we tend to come up with coherent reasons to explain our behavior that are often not grounded in reality.

This is exactly why in Thinking, Fast and Slow, behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman claimed, “A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped.” Your brain will gladly give you an answer. That answer, however, may not be grounded in reality. In fact, Kahneman outlines dozens of ways our brains get it wrong. It’s also why Kahneman argues confidence isn’t a good indicator of truth or reality. He writes, “Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it.” Not necessarily the truth.

You can’t simply ask your customers about their behavior and expect to get an accurate answer. Most will obligingly give you what sounds like a reasonable answer. But you won’t know if they are telling you about their ideal behavior or their actual behavior. Nor will you know if they are simply telling you a coherent story that sounds true but isn’t true in practice.

If you want to build a successful product, you need to understand your customers’ actual behavior—their reality—not the story they tell themselves.

The key to interviewing well is to distinguish what you are trying to learn (your research questions) from what you ask in the interview (your interview questions).

Once we’ve explored the opportunities that matter most to the customer, we can dive into the specifics of any of those opportunities. You may have specific opportunities in mind, but you’ll want to let your participant set the direction of the interview. Remember, what matters most to your customer trumps what you need to learn.

To represent opportunities as needs and not solutions. If the participant requests a specific feature or solution, ask about why they need that, and capture the opportunity (rather than the solution). A good way to do this is to ask, “If you had that feature, what would that do for you?”