Review

This is a great product discovery reference book. It brings together product discovery and delivery, and provides a great overview of the theory to date. It’s a book without ego, introducing just a couple of frameworks whilst signposting other important work. It doesn’t quite achieve a single theory that ties everything together, which is a shame. I do love though that it assumes a little product knowledge, which is refreshing as it allows for brevity. Well worthy of a read.

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Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

• Why it’s so hard to build technology that achieves outcomes:
• Confirmation Bias: Undervaluing facts that don’t confirm what you believe, and favouring information that does
• Optimism Bias: We are less likely of experiencing a negative event compared to others
• Valuing outputs over outcomes: ideas are useless unless they solve a problem
• IKEA effect: If we ourselves are the creators, we perceive our creations as more valuable that what they really are
• Unchallenged assumptions: assumptions often remain unchallenged due to confirmation bias. It’s really easy to underestimate what happens if an assumption is false
• Sunk cost fallacy: when people involved feel like they’ve invested too much time and effort. They don’t want that to be a waste
• Siloed work: everyone just focuses on execution, rather than challenging existing assumptions
• More output fallacy: the belief that the more work we do the better it will be.

• Rule of thumb: Discovery should take about 10% of build time

Product Discovery Principles

Discovery Frameworks

• Being iterative and incremental allows good feedback loops
• Three Qualities of Successful Products:

• The three types of risk: user value, business value, feasibility
• What’s the least amount of discovery we need to do to address a particular risk?
• Four stages for clarity / The double diamond

The powerful holistic framework

• The framework can help you understand what you historically did, or are presently doing:
• It can help you identify how ‘holistic’ is the approach you’re taking to discovery
• Are we assessing the risks well?
• Do we understand the full scope of the problem?
• Are we choosing the smartest way to visualise the solution at this stage?
• Are we evaluating with the right kind of people in a way that fits them?
• Will this activity make us learn the most?
• It can help you evaluate your toolbox, do you have questions, workshops and artefacts you can use in each box?

• Use the power of triangulation throughout discovery: Use several methods for each part of the matrix to make sure you cover as much ground as possible.

Known Playbook: Focused on User value:

1. Hypothesis: We believe customers have [problem x]. If we provide [solution y], we will see [desired outcome z].
• Don’t be rigid about structure, but mention the problem you want to solve, a high-level solution statement and intended outcome.
2. Design Studio: Illuminate the problem with a presentation. Sketch solutions with everyone. Present back. Critique to highlight key concerns, does it solve the problem?. Iterate and loop back multiple times until you have a shared understanding of the problem and some good ideas.
3. Prototype: create something tangible that you can test on users
4. User test: Test your prototype on real users.
• Book recommendation: Rocket Surgery Made Easy
5. Team Pitch: playback to a larger group of stakeholders and colleagues. Get feedback from a business/ organisational perspective

UnKnown Playbook focused on User Value:

1. Research questions: Host a workshop with the team to gather research questions they have about the subject. Create an affinity map of the stickies, cluster them in different categories. Dot-vote on the most important research questions.
2. User research: Use 3 sources to gather research data (e.g. analytics, user interviews, customer support), Triangulate and validate the data from multiple perspectives
3. Design Sprint: Synthesise insights and create tangible solutions.
• Benefits: focus, time-boxed, functional , invite people from diverse perspectives, you have all the tools at your disposal
4. Team Pitch: Invite a wider group to review what you’ve accomplished and feedback

Bring your product and design functions together

• Avoid your design function continually working in a studio model without other functions. You risk their discoveries not being linked to the priorities of the business, getting stuck half finished with no clear learnings as a result
• Get to transparency, show where every initiative is:

• Doing so will…
• More discoveries will move into delivery
• Relationships will improve between product and deisgn
• Product will get better at discovery
• Discovery items will be linked to business goals
• More transparency on what’s in flight
• Common vocabulary and toolkit

6. Strategic Product Discovery

• Set measurable goals early for business value and customer value early on.
• Follow up on them as often as possible
• Express goals as desirable outcomes (or impacts → what happens when you achieve a goal)
• Establish and keep a clear connection between the goals throughout the process
• Tool: Opportunity Trees (Teresa Torres’)
• Tool: Impact mapping (InUse by Gojko Adzic)
• Structure problem space exploration → prioritise throughout development
• SMART goals are great. Specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time based
• Goals should be outcome based → so they’re solution agnostic
• Impact mapping is good for when the emphasis is on different types of users

Outcome		x more of y by z
Target Groups	Group A	Group B	Group C
Needs	Need X	Need Ya Need Yb	Need Za Need Zb
Actions		Action Ta Action Tb

• Set and continuously measure the outcomes of business value and user value goals helps us to be strategic about product development from start to finsih.

• Feasibility Discovery in a nutshell:
• What skills do you have in the company?
• What technologies that you’re using might soon be obsolete
• What new technologies are there?
• How should we build things sustainably?
• What new competencies we need to develop?
• How we need to restructure organisation to meet future?
• Use Wardley Mapping to map: user needs → capabilities
• Use Thoughtworks Tech Radar to find a new potential solution and then build a spike to check if works

7. Discovery and Delivery sitting in a tree

• Product Discovery: Figuring out what to build
• Product Execution: Building it
• Product Definition
• Product Delivery
• Don’t confuse product definition with discovery.
• Discovery → Learning → Knowledge
• Delivery → Creating outcomes → Value
• Discovery isn’t a phase → It’s a mindset. Ideally we’d do it continuously.
• Feel you’ve learnt enough? → Be confident and move to delivery
• Feedback shows you don’t understand enough? → Be confident you should discover more
• Empowered teams and the Trio:
• Designer → customer point of view, user value
• Product → business view, value of the product
• Engineer → technology view, responsible for feasibility
• All → bring in additional expertise as required
• Discovery Brief
• Data: What trends are we seeing? (customer, sales, technology)
• Insight: Based on data, what are some clear insights we can leverage?
• Assumption: What are we assuming based on insights?
• Value: What’s the initial idea of the value proposition?
• Success: What does success look like?
• Discovery Stories: You can mix discovery and delivery by having discovery stories.
• Discovery Kanban: Work on the highest priority thing, balance learning rate and development rate over time
‣
Illustration:

• Not all problems are complex, and demand an iterative approach.
• Divide risk into 4 levels:
• No risk: Obvious problems → straight to delivery
• Low risk: Complicated problems → discovery process using playbook (mitigate risks)
• Medium risk: Complex problems → holistic discovery (iterate and increment through it)
• High risk: Complex problem, where if invalidated the product fails → quickly validate or invalidate our assumptions (e.g. Lean Startup)
• Ask the questions…
• How well do we understand the problem?
• How well do we understand the solution?
• Continuous Collaborative Discovery and Delivery:
• No risk? Go straight to delivery: Build, Measure, Learn
• Step A: No discovery Required
• Step B: Delivery (Build, Measure, Learn)
• Low/ Medium risk?
• Step A: Discovery Playbook (Triangulation Methods, double diamond)
• Step B: Delivery (Build, Measure, Learn)
• For high risk do Build, Measure, Learn loop before building
• Step A: Discovery assumption exploration (Build, Measure, Learn)
• Step B: Delivery (Build, Measure, Learn)
‣
Diagram

• Barriers to good discovery:
1. Lack of time and budget
2. Lack of buy-in and hard to prove value
3. Lack of involving the right people
4. Lack of access to users
• Change Model (Kurt Lewin)
‣
Thawing:
• Getting ready to change
• Establish that change in necessary
• Getting ready to leave comfort zone
• Compelling message required to get people to let go
• Having insight into the disease when you’re ill
‣
Transitioning:
• Making the changes that are needed
• A process, a transition
• Involve people in the process changes
• Get people’s feedback?
• Is it working
• Get to a shared understanding
‣
Freezing:
• Make the change permanent
• Develop ways to sustain the change
• Peter Axbom’s Building Blocks for Change
• Lippitt-Knoster Model for Managing Complex Change, helps focus effort on a goal

Deep Summary

Longer form notes, typically condensed, reworded and de-duplicated.

• This book is aimed at demystifying product discovery
• An effective product
• Business: makes money
• User: makes users happy
• Technical: is feasible to build
• Don’t just focus on your own part of the equation
• Why it’s so hard to build technology that achieves outcomes:
• Confirmation Bias: Undervaluing facts that don’t confirm what you believe, and favouring information that does
• Optimism Bias: We are less likely of experiencing a negative event compared to others
• Valuing outputs over outcomes: ideas are useless unless they solve a problem
• IKEA effect: If we ourselves are the creators, we perceive our creations as more valuable that what they really are
• Unchallenged assumptions: assumptions often remain unchallenged due to confirmation bias. It’s really easy to underestimate what happens if an assumption is false
• Sunk cost fallacy: when people involved feel like they’ve invested too much time and effort. They don’t want that to be a waste
• Siloed work: everyone just focuses on execution, rather than challenging existing assumptions
• More output fallacy: the belief that the more work we do the better it will be.
• Product is hard.
• Features: Only 20% of features built are often used by users, 30% are used infrequently or hardly ever (50%).
• Companies: 42% of startups fail because there’s no market need
• Product lessons:
• Don’t always listen to the customer
• Acknowledge test results
• Don’t be under time-pressure
• Excess capital creates complexity
• Software projects have two distinct stages:

• How important is discovery to success? (source nngroup.com)

It takes just as much effort to build the wrong thing as it does the right thing. John Allspaw

• Executives focus more on delivery than discovery. It’s easier to measure progress.
• Discovery is about:
• maximising impact be figuring out what to build
• minimising waste by figuring out what not to build
• Rule of thumb: Discovery should take about 10% of build time

Product Discovery Principles

• Problem-first approach over solution-first
• Fall in love with the problem not the solution
• Drill down to the core of the problem.
• Keep the problem top-of-mind, never forget the problem you’re solving.
• Outcomes over outputs
• it’s the outcome and impact that counts
• Team diversity, trust & openness over individual effort
• Diversity, inclusion, psychological safety, collaboration
• Diverse teams are 20% better at innovation and reduce risk by 30% (Source: Deloitte diversity and inclusion revolution)
• Holistic view over local optimisation
• Get the valuable perspectives of different disciplines
• Look beyond your silo, beyond your job, focus on what the company needs to achieve
• Continuous discovery over unplanned exploration
• The future is unknowable if you work in a complex domain. The only way to operate is to sense and respond

Discovery Frameworks

• Any approach requires a good feedback loops. Good feedback loops are iterative and incremental
• Iterative: repetition of a process to collect feedback and improve things for next time around
• Incremental: working in small batches, each increment builds on what came before
• Three Qualities of Successful Products:

• How can we fulfil the needs of customers, build the product in a sustainable way and build a sustainable business?
• The three types of risk: user value, business value, feasibility
• Highlight the risks upfront
• What’s the least amount of discovery we need to do to address a particular risk?
• See other books to learn about Ethical risk:
• Digital Compassion by Peter Axbom
• Future Ethics by Cennydd Bowels
• A designer’s code of ethics by Mike Monteiro
• Double Diamond (British Design Council)
‣
Diagram

1. User-centred design (UX) is one of the better existing frameworks
• Divergence: Exploring an issue more widely or deeply
• Convergence: Taking focused action
2. Diamond 1 (Explore the problem space)
• Spend time with customers, gather insight, define the problem
3. Diamond 2 (Explore the solution space)
• Generate potential solutions, validate them through prototypes
4. Not a linear process, can loop through it a few times
• Four stages for clarity

4. The powerful holistic framework

• Imagine an iterative and incremental process that systematically considers the three risks at each stage of the double diamond
• You can use the cells in the table to highlight questions or actual techniques

• The framework can help you understand what you historically did, or are presently doing:
• It can help you identify how ‘holistic’ is the approach you’re taking to discovery
• Are we assessing the risks well?
• Do we understand the full scope of the problem?
• Are we choosing the smartest way to visualise the solution at this stage?
• Are we evaluating with the right kind of people in a way that fits them?
• Will this activity make us learn the most?

‣

Diagram for how activities can be mapped

• It can help you evaluate your toolbox, do you have questions, workshops and artefacts you can use in each box?
• You can run a workshop with your team to brainstorm product-discovery methods
• User value row: UX Design, Design Thinking, Service Design, Design Sprint, Lean UX
• Business value row: Business Model Generation, Customer Development, Jobs to be Done, Sense & Respond, Discover to Deliver and Lean Startup)

• Use the power of triangulation throughout discovery: Use several methods for each part of the matrix to make sure you cover as much ground as possible.
• Early on: qualitative methods are to be preferred
• Later on: quantitative methods are better (as they can understand what users are doing)

5. Product Discovery Playbooks

• Playbooks help teams navigate discoveries
• Known vs Unknown Playbook:
• Problems can have a varying degree of complexity
• Sometimes problems are easy to solve, else problems might need a lot of research
• Harder problems require more work, to find the root cause

Known Playbook: Focused on User value:

1. Hypothesis: We believe customers have [problem x]. If we provide [solution y], we will see [desired outcome z].
• Don’t be rigid about structure, but mention the problem you want to solve, a high-level solution statement and intended outcome.
2. Design Studio: Illuminate the problem with a presentation. Sketch solutions with everyone. Present back. Critique to highlight key concerns, does it solve the problem?. Iterate and loop back multiple times until you have a shared understanding of the problem and some good ideas.
3. Prototype: create something tangible that you can test on users
4. User test: Test your prototype on real users.
• Book recommendation: Rocket Surgery Made Easy
5. Team Pitch: playback to a larger group of stakeholders and colleagues. Get feedback from a business/ organisational perspective

UnKnown Playbook focused on User Value:

1. Research questions: Host a workshop with the team to gather research questions they have about the subject. Create an affinity map of the stickies, cluster them in different categories. Dot-vote on the most important research questions.
2. User research: Use 3 sources to gather research data (e.g. analytics, user interviews, customer support), Triangulate and validate the data from multiple perspectives
3. Design Sprint: Synthesise insights and create tangible solutions.
• Benefits: focus, time-boxed, functional , invite people from diverse perspectives, you have all the tools at your disposal
4. Team Pitch: Invite a wider group to review what you’ve accomplished and feedback

Bring your product and design functions together

• Avoid your design function continually working in a studio model without other functions. You risk their discoveries not being linked to the priorities of the business, getting stuck half finished with no clear learnings as a result
• Get to transparency, show where every initiative is:

• Doing so will…
• More discoveries will move into delivery
• Relationships will improve between product and deisgn
• Product will get better at discovery
• Discovery items will be linked to business goals
• More transparency on what’s in flight
• Common vocabulary and toolkit

6. Strategic Product Discovery

• Set measurable goals early for business value and customer value early on.
• Follow up on them as often as possible
• Express goals as desirable outcomes (or impacts → what happens when you achieve a goal)
• Establish and keep a clear connection between the goals throughout the process
• Tool: Opportunity Trees (Teresa Torres’)
• Tool: Impact mapping (InUse by Gojko Adzic)
• Structure problem space exploration → prioritise throughout development
• SMART goals are great. Specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time based
• Goals should be outcome based → so they’re solution agnostic
• Impact mapping is good for when the emphasis is on different types of users

Outcome		x more of y by z
Target Groups	Group A	Group B	Group C
Needs	Need X	Need Ya Need Yb	Need Za Need Zb
Actions		Action Ta Action Tb

• Set and continuously measure the outcomes of business value and user value goals helps us to be strategic about product development from start to finsih.

• Feasibility Discovery in a nutshell:
• What skills do you have in the company?
• What technologies that you’re using might soon be obsolete
• What new technologies are there?
• How should we build things sustainably?
• What new competencies we need to develop?
• How we need to restructure organisation to meet future?
• Use Wardley Mapping to map: user needs → capabilities
• Use Thoughtworks Tech Radar to find a new potential solution and then build a spike to check if works

7. Discovery and Delivery sitting in a tree

• Product Discovery: Figuring out what to build
• Product Execution: Building it
• Product Definition
• Product Delivery
• Don’t confuse product definition with discovery.
• Discovery doesn’t always inform us that we should build something.
• Focus is on finding the right problem to solve → finding the right solution for that problem
• Discovery → Learning → Knowledge
• Delivery → Creating outcomes → Value
• It’s not easy to switch between discovery and delivery, they focus on different things and have different personalities.
• Discovery isn’t a phase → It’s a mindset. Ideally we’d do it continuously.
• Feel you’ve learnt enough? → Be confident and move to delivery
• Feedback shows you don’t understand enough? → Be confident you should discover more
• Look for virtual walls between discovery and delivery → replace them with collaboration and feedback loops
• Sprint Zero: Don’t misunderstand it, it’s getting ready for build, it’s not discovery
• Design Sprints: can break down silos, and help delivery teams learn discovery
• Holistic Product Discovery: a structured way of doing discovery.
• Dual track scrum: Make sure it doesn’t divide discovery and delivery.
• Cadences and signals:
• A cadence is the beat and rate of a rhythmic sequence, they enable feedback loops and shifts between discovery and delivery mindsets
• A signal is an indication that we need to do something else. E.g. running continuous quantitative and qualitative tests → switching mindsets if you get certain results.
• Do we have enough knowledge? Is the risk low enough?
• Empowered teams and the Trio:
• Designer → customer point of view, user value
• Product → business view, value of the product
• Engineer → technology view, responsible for feasibility
• All → bring in additional expertise as required
• Discovery Brief: (inspired by Spotify Data, Insight, Belief, Bet)
• Data: What trends are we seeing? (customer, sales, technology)
• Insight: Based on data, what are some clear insights we can leverage?
• Assumption: What are we assuming based on insights?
• Value: What’s the initial idea of the value proposition?
• Success: What does success look like?
• Discovery Stories: You can mix discovery and delivery by having discovery stories.
• Discovery Kanban: Work on the highest priority thing, balance learning rate and development rate over time
‣
Illustration:

• Cynefin Model (Dave Snowden)

Complex	Complicated
Enabling constraints Loosely coupled Probe → Sense → Respond Emergent Practice	Governing constraints Tightly coupled Sense → Analyse → Respond
Chaotic	Clear
Lacking constraint De-coupled Act → Sense → Respond Novel Practice	Tightly constrained No degrees of freedom Sense → Categorise → Respond Best Practice

• Not all problems are complex, and demand an iterative approach.
• Divide risk into 4 levels:
• No risk: Obvious problems → straight to delivery
• Low risk: Complicated problems → discovery process using playbook (mitigate risks)
• Medium risk: Complex problems → holistic discovery (iterate and increment through it)
• High risk: Complex problem, where if invalidated the product fails → quickly validate or invalidate our assumptions (e.g. Lean Startup)
• Ask the questions…
• How well do we understand the problem?
• How well do we understand the solution?
• Do we know that the solution solves the problem effectively, efficiently and sustainably?
• Lean Startup:
• Loop: Build → Measure → Learn
• Mimics the scientific method and experimentation
• Combine two loops:
• Discovery or Idea based: Build, Measure, Learn
• Delivery or backlog based: Build, Measure, Learn
• Ideas that are promising make the backlog
• Learning from implemented backlog items feed ideas/discovery
• Lean UX is like Lean Startup but is based mainly on qualitative where the Lean Startup method is Quantitative
• Continuous Collaborative Discovery and Delivery:
• No risk? Go straight to delivery: Build, Measure, Learn
• Step A: No discovery Required
• Step B: Delivery (Build, Measure, Learn)
• Low/ Medium risk?
• Step A: Discovery Playbook (Triangulation Methods, double diamond)
• Step B: Delivery (Build, Measure, Learn)
• For high risk do Build, Measure, Learn loop before building
• Step A: Discovery assumption exploration (Build, Measure, Learn)
• Step B: Delivery (Build, Measure, Learn)
‣
Diagram

8. How to get started

• Understanding the culture is important. 4 main reasons for not being able to do good discovery:
1. Lack of time and budget
2. Lack of buy-in and hard to prove value
3. Lack of involving the right people
4. Lack of access to users
• Existing processes can make it hard to do a good discovery
• Three types of change:
• Operational: improve what you do already
• Transitional: change what you do (process)
• Transformational: change mindsets and behaviours, organisational and cultural change

Know Your Change Models:

• ADKAR Model (Jeff Hiatt)
• 8 Step Change Model (John Kotter)
• Change Model (Kurt Lewin)
• Thawing:
• Getting ready to change
• Establish that change in necessary
• Getting ready to leave comfort zone
• Compelling message required to get people to let go
• Having insight into the disease when you’re ill
• Transitioning:
• Making the changes that are needed
• A process, a transition
• Involve people in the process changes
• Get people’s feedback?
• Is it working
• Get to a shared understanding
• Freezing:
• Make the change permanent
• Develop ways to sustain the change
• Peter Axbom’s Building Blocks for Change
• Lippitt-Knoster Model for Managing Complex Change, helps focus effort on a goal