The unpredictability of Discovery work: managing expectations in an outcome-based roadmap

Managing expectations is a skill every one of us needs regardless of our role: give people wrong expectations and they’ll be unhappy, even if what you end up delivering is fantastic.

I’ve been doing more Discovery work for the past year and, if managing expectations with stakeholders in Delivery is hard, in Discovery is even harder.

Discovery is a work of exploration. Or to use the same analogy I used for estimates: doing Discovery is like exploring a desert without knowing what will come ahead.

In other words, our goal is to cross the desert, but we don’t know yet what we’ll find ahead. Or even if we’ll be able to reach its end.

Discovery work is in someway similar: there’ll always going to be unknown unknowns, which means we’ll need to change our course many times during our mission to reach the goal, if we ever do.

When we start Discovery work we have a goal in mind: for example, we define we want to validate the existence of a problem in the market, or if a solution is desired, easy to use, or technically feasible.

For this, we may also trace a plan for the set of activities or outputs we’ll deliver to reach these answers.

But that path not always goes as planned:

• Sometimes we have to change our course (the activities or outputs of the discovery), due to constraints, or because we realised a different path is better to reach our goal.
• Sometimes, while validating a product’s usability, we find out that this solution isn’t desired by the market. Or worse, that the problem doesn’t even exist.
• Sometimes, while exploring technical approaches for a solution, and their feasibility, we conclude there isn’t one single fantastic solution, but two or three OK ones, all with their advantages and disadvantages.

Presenting these results to stakeholders is hard. Especially since, in various cases, what they expect is a confirmation of their initial thoughts: that the solution they had in mind is the right one.

But this is not Delivery, where we agree in a set of deliverables and deliver exactly what was defined. At least if you’re doing an output-based (not outcome-based) roadmap during Delivery.

This is Discovery: an unpredictable and in many times messy practice.

So if there’s one thing I’ve been learning, is that to educate and highlight the potential challenges in a Discovery to Stakeholders, with a list of possible outcomes (and maybe together with plans B, C and D for each), is especially important when starting Discovery work.

I’m Daniel, Product Manager at Whitesmith. Paper Planes is a place where I reflect on my experiences and learnings on the craft of Product Management.

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