Committing to continuous discovery means changing the way your product team operates. It’s no longer about making decisions purely based on your intuitions or stakeholder requests, but finding ways to integrate touch points with customers into your work every week—if not every day. Continuous discovery means not making decisions purely based on your intuitions or stakeholder requests, but finding ways to integrate touch points with customers into your work every week. – This can sound overwhelming. Your schedule may already be double-booked and you might already feel like there’s no room to ..read more

In May, I’ll be hosting three webinars. If you are working on your discovery habits, check out the lineup and come join one. May 6 – Opportunity Solution Trees: Overcoming the Most Common Mistakes In this one-hour webinar, I’ll cover the most common mistakes teams make when getting started with opportunity solution trees and how to overcome them. This event is a great fit for product managers, designers, engineers, and any other roles involved in building digital products who are using opportunity solution trees to manage their discovery efforts (or would like to). Register here. May 7 – Assu ..read more

Leading a product team (or several teams) comes with its own set of challenges that’s often similar to but distinct from the hurdles individual product contributors face. There’s pressure coming from all directions—your company leaders expect you to deliver business results while your product teams may be working in silos, misaligned with their peers, or unclear on core product skills and concepts. And if you’re trying to guide your teams toward being more empowered and autonomous, this is a process that takes dedicated time and commitment. That’s why it’s especially enlightening when you enco ..read more

I’m hosting several free events over the next two weeks. I’d love for you to join one of them. March 25th: The What & Why of Continuous Discovery In this webinar, I’ll introduce participants to the continuous discovery framework I introduced in my book Continuous Discovery Habits. We’ll cover: The difference between discovery and delivery My definition of continuous discovery Why continuous discovery matters What a good continuous discovery team does week over week How you can develop your own discovery habits This webinar is great for folks in product, design, or engineering who are ne ..read more

When an organization shifts from delivery or feature teams to product teams, the first step is often a change to team structure. Delivery and feature teams are often structured by function—front-end teams, back-end teams, mobile teams, etc. These teams can rarely deliver value on their own. Instead, they hand off work from team to team—the back-end engineers design the data model and system architecture, the front-end engineers build the interface elements, the mobile engineers work toward feature parity, etc. The challenge with this way of working is that it is both slow and constraining. It ..read more

When you’re building a product, you can easily get overwhelmed by ideas. There are the ideas your product trio comes up with based on your discovery work, the ideas that come from your customers in the form of specific requests, and the ideas that come from stakeholders within your company like your customer-facing teams or CEO, to name a few. While some of these ideas are unsolicited and may not relate to your current outcome or the opportunities you’re pursuing, that doesn’t mean you want to ignore or discard them completely. Just because an idea isn’t something you’re going to pursue today ..read more

Continuous discovery is not a linear journey—as much as we might want it to be. Like a lot of learning, it often feels messy and chaotic. Continuous discovery is not a linear journey—as much as we might want it to be. Like a lot of learning, it often feels messy and chaotic. – But if you stick with it, you may eventually find you can look back and see how much you’ve progressed. That’s certainly the case for Kelsey Terry, who’s sharing her story in today’s Product in Practice. In her former role as Director of Product at Going (formerly known as Scott’s Cheap Flights), Kelsey was tasked with ..read more

When you start interviewing customers every week, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by how much you are learning. When we use our customer interviews to collect specific stories about past behavior, every conversation can uncover dozens of unmet customer needs, pain points, and desires (AKA opportunities). I recommend teams use three different artifacts to keep track of what they are learning from their customer interviews: The interview snapshot: This artifact summarizes what you learned from a single customer interview. Teams should create an interview snapshot for each interview that they condu ..read more

There are all kinds of ways to introduce continuous discovery habits. If you’ve been at your company for a while, you might get inspired after reading a book or attending a conference. If you’re joining a new company, you might want to try a new tactic out with your new team. And if you’re really excited about an idea, you might look for opportunities to share it outside your company with the broader product community. Today’s Product in Practice features a continuous discovery champion who did all three. Tali Melchior, Director of Product Management at Texthelp, was first inspired to experime ..read more

The larger and more complex your company is, the more challenging it can be to introduce continuous discovery. It’s not just about training people to conduct interviews, use opportunity solution trees, or test assumptions—though those are all important activities—it’s also about convincing them of the value of these activities and getting the people they work with on board as well. Sandrine Veillet’s Product in Practice story perfectly exemplifies this. While Sandrine was convinced of the impact continuous discovery could have at her organization, her task wasn’t as simple as just introducing ..read more