Enlightening the Product & Continuous Discovery (part III)
How do you respond?
In the previous section, I described what I did in terms of progression to conclude on enlightening the Product & Continuous Discovery, by all means, what’s the simplest way to do in practice. For this third part, I have detailed how you can follow easy steps to succeed in the two-way conversation in a decision-making environment.
I know you will say “nice, but doesn’t work in my company.” Well, you will need executives’ support. That is a fact. Or at least one manager up to lift the current progress giving you autonomy and an opportunity to work, learn from mistakes and make product decisions.
But even if you don’t, this model is still sustainable to do some of the steps. Start minimum, measure, and present the — hopefully — positive results to executives (if you don’t know how send me a comment and we can figure something together). Thus, through facts and data is more comfortable to prove the growth of your product in getting early validation, prove team performance, and, more important, team empowerment. Be a missionary team!
Too dreamy? I was in your spot. The experiment that I mentioned before was the first time that something similar happened in my present company. Luckily, we found a problem instead of a top-down idea. And to succeed, we had full support from the team’s Product Strategist. Afterward, we presented the outcomes from the discovery, and he was pleased with the results.
Also, in my case, other executives have started a movement to promote better practices in our company for software development. Many colleagues have began to focus on outcomes and user validation too.
Bring others together, spread the voice of change!
Well, again, I do not want to reinvent the wheel. You can use different frameworks and methodologies within this model. I want to show you that it is possible to have a continuous learning.
We can find similar models online (check this article from Jeff Gothelf — which made me happy as a confirmation of going in the right direction). I’ve decided to share my ‘two cents’ to help teams determine collaboratively in accomplishing the outcome, but also facilitate the discovery in adopting a user-centered direction. If you learn from the series at least one new thing, that’s enough for me :)
Advancing to the next experiment, we have:
Perform weekly discovery
When I was brainstorming, collecting information from my studies, I start with this question: What are the most critical aspects of product creation?
Then I begin to think: the target audience is a crucial factor, also track risks upfront and define value out to a goal, and all collaboratively. Next, I aligned all the aspects that I encounter to comprehend how we’re able to identify desirability, feasibility, and viability.
To harmonize these thoughts made sense to place them in a flow and capture how a product creation process should look.
Based on the stream above, I tried to break it down by adding more details. And I came up with this step-by-step:
You can see that every action highlighted above in the previous part of this series. (I wanted to invest some time to explain in a more practical path.)
I know it seems many stages to follow. Once you start, you realize how easy it is and how important they are. Many of them are essential stages for a company to succeed, so I hope you already have much of the information needed. Likewise, it is critical to have executives and the team together along the way.
To give a better visualization of how the model should be, let’s look at the image below:
Quarterly
Most companies work with quarterly goals and priorities established from a Product Roadmap based on a company’s strategy. As a Product Manager, your job is to follow these trends to organize the development and maximize the value.
As an initial phase of the Discovery, you need to identify OKRs or Company’s goals to design your path towards it.
Nonetheless, before or at the beginning of every quarter, you need to align the outcome(s) that the team will be addressing for the next three months. As I explain in the first part, we can consider an outcome one of the key result from OKRs. Or another company’s goal.
I’m using OKRs as an example because I believe it is the best tool to maintain engagement and alignment over the objectives.
Regarding the outcome, you have to build communication with the executives to scale the plan and adjust expectations.
They can provide a better understanding of the strategy and which outputs (key results) they expect to achieve during the quarter.
(Objectives & Key Results are essential to help you set a purpose in your company or team. I usually have a separated OKRs for the product too. It helps the metrics.)
Then, with an outcome in hands, the team can start thinking in opportunities based on bottom-up autonomy.
These opportunities are build from user necessities, pains, desires, or in the market’s fortuity. Also, you can discover new ones while interviewing people. It can be lead by team members, stakeholders, or consumers, which means that opportunities should be created collaboratively throughout the process.
You need to have these opportunities prioritized to order coming up work. It’s not feasible to build all of them at once. For each one, you will start by answering the questions in the Product Opportunity Assessment by Marty Cagan. In the end, you will have detailed GO or NO-GO opportunities.
Afterward, with the GO list, you will prioritize them by using any technique that you find more suitable. I suggest the Kano Model. This tool promotes the roadmap creation and management with desired, feasible, and viable items to proceed to focus on user satisfaction and product’s functionalities. Finally, you will have a catalog of priorities ordered by high to low.
Consider to have a document (I currently use Confluence and Sharepoint) maintaining the transparency of the process across every person involved. Not only that, it is crucial they have full access to add ideas, and so on.
Also, in this document, make sure you have your product’s strategy contemplating the entire model steps. That way, stakeholders and team members can be on the same page and in pursuit of the same purpose as all intentions are in there.
Part of it, we have the target audience. Usually, a team knows your customers and the market segment.
If you don’t know, perform a persona workshop to identify them. Indeed, it is fundamental to understand who are you pointing your product.
Knowing and listening to these end-users will give you determined answers about the product, go, or no-go. They need to love what you’re building, or at least guide you to progress in the right direction.
Identify personas and secure a group of audience for your product. Inspect, define, and classify a list of users for specific opportunities. Hence, this list will assist you in finding the right fit for user validations.
I suggest to prompt relationships with some customers associated with the target group that can cooperate with you during continuous discovery experimentations.
To give you an example, considering the story I told in the previous article, we’ve performed the continuous discovery interview with sixteen users so far. These people are in our database to be reached out for next product’s explorations. We’ve built a good relationship with them, and they’re very on board to help us.
Each quarter (or as necessary depending on your company’s process and strategy), you, the rest of the team, and stakeholders will review the goals, desired outcome, prioritize opportunities, and personas. It will help you to plan the quarter commitment, leading us to the weekly work.
Be tuned for the last part of this series coming soon. 🙏
(Please notice that I’m not native in English and I apologize for mistakes)
