Continuous Discovery Habits - my learnings part 2
Thanks for subscribing! Here’s part 2 of my learnings. You can find the first part here
Before we dive in, here’s a quote from Jeff Patton, author of User Story Mapping, to set the mood right
“Remember: at the end of the day, your job isn’t to get the requirements right — your job is to change the world.”
- Jeff Patton, User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product
Contents
Continuous discovery journey
Continuous discovery interviews
Continuous discovery metrics
Part 2
Continuous discovery journey
Steps to discover and deliver continuously:
Defining a clear desired outcome
Interviews to discover opportunities
Visually capture and synthesise learnings with experience maps and opportunity solution trees
Prioritise a target opportunity
Brainstorm solutions
Identify hidden assumptions
Rapidly test those assumptions
Continue to measure impact all the way through delivery
Most of the work in discovery is not following the process - it's managing the cycles
A typical week in continuous discovery journey: "We killed an opportunity on Tuesday, chose a new one on Wednesday, and used our already scheduled interview calls on Thursday to learn about the new opportunity"
The fruit of discovery work is often the time we save when we decide to not build something
The most original ideas tend to be generated toward the end of ideations
As brainstorming rose in popularity, academic researchers started to question if it worked. Study after study found that the individuals generating ideas alone outperformed the brainstorming groups
People tend to work harder when working individually than when working in groups. This is called social loafing
Continuous discovery interviews
Decades of research on investigative interviewing has shown that interview participants struggle to answer direct (factual) questions accurately
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 golden rule of interviewing is to let the participant talk about what they care about most
Since we can’t ask our customers direct questions about their behavior, the best way to learn about their needs, pain points, and desires is to ask them to share specific stories about their experience
Memories about recent instances are more reliable than our generalisations about our own behavior or our answers to direct questions
You don’t want to rely on your memory to keep your research straight. That’s the job of an interview snapshot. Snapshots are designed to help you remember specific stories
The goal with the snapshot is to capture as much of what you heard in each interview as possible. You’ll be surprised how often an opportunity that seems unique to one customer becomes a common pattern heard in several interviews
We don’t want to think about interviewing as a step in a linear process. Instead, our goal is interview continuously
Most companies have teams who are on the phone with customers day in and day out. You can work with these teams to help you recruit interview participants
We dramatically underestimate how much our customers want to help
One advantage of interviewing the same customers month over month is that you get to learn about their context in-depth and see how it changes over time
Continuous discovery metrics
Let’s understand how tails.com measures their key metrics in a continuous discovery world. A bit about tails.com first:
At tails.com, we create tailor-made dog food to help dogs be happier and healthier. Customers answer a series of questions online about their dog and we create a blend specifically for them out of over a million different combinations, which we then deliver to their door.
- Sonja Martin, Product Manager @Tails.com
Tails.com measures three types of metrics: business outcomes, product outcomes and traction outcomes
Business outcomes measure business value e.g. Retention of users subscribed to tail.com
Product outcomes measure how product drive business value e.g. % of dogs who like the food
Traction outcomes track usage of specific features e.g. owners who use the transition calendar (to schedule diets for their dogs)
Most of the business metrics are usually lagging indicator, they measure something after it has happened
We want to identify leading indicators that identify the direction of lagging indicators
Product teams should focus on product outcomes instead of business outcomes because:
Business outcomes are lagging indicators
Product outcomes measure human behaviour
Product outcomes are within the influence of the team
We can increase the accountability of each team by assigning metrics that is relevant to their own work
When multiple teams are assigned the same outcome, it's easy to shift blame for the lack of progress
When setting product outcomes, we want to make sure we are giving the product trio enough latitude to explore. Key delineation between outcome vs output mindset
“You’ll never stumble upon the unexpected if you stick only to the familiar.”
- Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.
Upcoming
Continuous discovery teams
Continuous discovery stakeholder management
Continuous discovery habits