Daniel's notes on Continuous Discovery Habits

Projects were too big. Teams spent way too much time building the wrong stuff before they learned that customers didn't want it. 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.

Product managers bring the business context--they help teams ensure that the products they are building are viable for the business. They ensure that the business that supports the product will survive over time, allowing the team to further satisfy customers' needs.

All three roles—product managers, designers, and software engineers—are critical to the success of any digital product. They are collectively responsible for ensuring that their products create value for the customer in a way that creates value for the business.

You need to start thinking in terms of 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).

Step beyond the comfort of spoken and written language and to tap into our immense power as spatial thinkers. I 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.

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.

When a product trio is tasked with an outcome, they have a choice. Thev can choose to engage with customers, do the work required to truly understand their customers' context, and focus on creating value for their customers. Or they can take short-cuts--they can focus on creating business value at the cost of customers.

Finding the best path to your desired outcome is what researchers call an "ill-structured problem"-also commonly called a "wicked problem." IlI-structured problems are defined by having many solutions. There are no right or wrong answers, only better or worse ones.

Much of the work when tackling an ill-structured problem is framing the problem itself. How we frame a problem has a big impact on how we might solve it. For example, in the Wells Fargo story, their leadership, whether implicitly or explicitly, had framed the problem as "grow customer accounts at all costs." This framing opened the door to cheating. If, on the other hand, Wells Fargo had framed the problem as "create customers who want to open more accounts," bankers would have been less likely to cheat.

If product trios tasked with delivering a desired outcome want to pursue business value by creating customer value, they'll need to work to frame the problem in a customer-centric way. They'll need to discover the customer needs, pain points, and desires that, if addressed, would drive their business outcome.

- Opportunities: customer needs, pain points, and desires. - Opportunity Space: problem space + desire space 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.

book “Decisive”, outlines four villains of decision-making 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. 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. We are often sure our ideas will be runaway successes.

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?"

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.