Continuous Discovery Habits

To get started, you'll want to first set the scope of your experience map. Think strategically about how broad or narrow to set the scope. When a team is focused on an optimization outcome, like increasing application submissions, it's fine to define the scope narrowly. However, when working on a more open-ended outcome, you'll want to expand the scope of your experience map.

To shift your outcome from less of an output to more of an outcome, question the impact it will have. 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.

When your product leader assigns a new initiative to your product trio: • What business outcome are we trying to drive with this initiative? • Why do we think this initiative will drive that outcome? • What's most important to the business right now? Try to frame this conversation in terms of business outcomes. • If you are being asked to deliver a business outcome, try mapping out which product outcomes might drive that business outcome

managing by outcomes communicates to the team how they should be measuring success. A clear outcome helps a team align around the work they should be prioritizing, it helps them choose the right customer opportunities to address, and it helps them measure the impact of their experiments.

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 uncer. tainty. 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.

When we manage by outcomes, we give our teams the autonomy, responsibility, and ownership to chart their own path. Instead of asking them to deliver a fixed roadmap full of features by a specific date in time, we are asking them to solve a customer problem or to address a business need. The key distinction with this strategy over traditional roadmaps is that we are giving the team the autonomy to find the best solution.

When we learn through testing that an idea won't work, it's not enough to move on to the next idea. We need to take time to reflect. We want to ask: "Based on my current understanding of my customer, I thought this solution would work. It didn't. What did I misunderstand about my customer?" We then need to revise our understanding of the opportunity space before moving on to new solutions.I When we do this, our next set of solutions get better. When we skip this step, we are simply guessing again, hoping that we'll strike gold.

Instead of asking, "Should we solve this customer need?" we'll ask, "Which of these customer needs is most important for us to address right now?" Instead of falling in love with our first idea, we'll ask, "What else could we build?" or "How else might we address this opportunity?"