Review

Teressa Torress is a household name in the Product community, and this might be the most influential product book written for a decade. It became an instant classic with Product Managers for good reason.

I suspect it resonated with PMs because so many teams are struggling to do product discovery well. Teressa made it seem easy.

Once you’ve mapped your opportunity space as a tree, prioritisation and research become easier. You’ll be able to systematically identify the most important thing to do next (research, experiment or build).

Meeting customers regularly increases your both the quality and quantity of insight, and helps you navigate your opportunity space.

There’s a ton of value in this book, so I recommend reading it in full.

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Lean UX

Even though it seems positioned more toward designers, this is an incredibly important book for product managers. It does a great job of integrating the concepts from Lean Startup with existing methodologies (Design Thinking, Agile, UX design). It’s packed full of principles and practical implementation advice for teams. There’s little in this book I disagree with.

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The Right It

Marty Cagan acknowledges in "Inspired" that most of our products and features won't meet expectations, and the ones that do require a lot of iteration to reach that point. I believe this is THE most important observation about product development. This book does a great job of articulating that phenomenon and proposes a robust way to navigate it. This is the best book on validating product ideas that I’ve read. I will forever be sharing this book.

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Holistic Product Discovery

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.

• Agile helped teams build more software - but it agile doesn’t help us build the right thing. The fruit of discovery work is the time saved not building something that won’t work.
• Historically, teams viewed discovery as as a one-time activity at the beginning of projects - and focused too much on delivery. Teressa advocates for continuous discovery → having weekly touch-points with customers to conduct small research activities - with a desired outcome in mind
• Successful products provide value to both the business and the customer. How we frame a problem influences how we solve it - therefore teams should frame problems in a customer centric way.
• Mapping the opportunity space and selecting which opportunities to pursue are high leverage points in a product team’s system, they are crucial to a team’s success.
• The Opportunity Solution tree helps teams select the most impactful thing to do next - even if that activity is more discovery/exploration. What should we build next? Becomes what should we do next?

• Prioritising opportunities not solutions will save you time. Product strategy doesn’t happen in the solution space, it happens in the opportunity space.
• Teams should be assigned outcomes, and given freedom to explore and select opportunities. It’s unfair to assign an outcome to a team they can’t influence. It’s important to help teams find tractable metrics, that will ultimately impact the business outcome.
• Visualise what you know in a customer’s experience map - and use it to guide your interviews. Interviews help discover and explore opportunities. Meet with customers regularly and you don’t have to cover so much ground. Instead you can get insight into the opportunity area that you’re working on now - just in time to influence what potential solutions could look like
• You and your team can take a step towards this way of working today. Pick your moment to advocate for more discovery. To maintain autonomy teams must show their work to stakeholders - opportunities explored, customers spoken to, metrics identified etc.

Deep Summary

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

Continuous Discovery Habits

• The book describes a continuous discovery framework that’s equally applicable to new products and iterating on existing ones.
• The Two Types of product work
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Discovery: work that helps you decide what to build
1. Delivery: work you do to build and ship
• Many product teams focus too much on delivery and treat discovery as something that happens as a one-time activity at the beginning of projects.

Continuous Discovery Mindset (Required before you start)

Working definition of Continuous Discovery

A Common Framework for Continuous Discovery

• Balance the needs of the business with the needs of the customer. Profit shouldn’t come at the cost of serving the customer. Serving customers is how you generate profit.
• Begin with the end in mind. Shifting from output mindset to an outcome mindset. Lay the foundation for success - by starting with outcomes not outputs
• Task product trio with delivering an outcome. Give them space to explore the best outputs. Give the team the latitude thy need to create value. They have a choice - choose to engage with customers - do the work to understand the customer context.
• Organisational context has a big impact on success. Will the team choose to put the customer first? Or take shortcuts and do things the business wants without regard for the customer

The Challenge of driving outcomes

• The purpose of the customer touchpoint is to conduct research in pursuit of a desired outcome. Looking for a ways to serve customers - that create business value.
• Finding the best way to achieve that desired outcome is an ill-structured (or wicked) problem. There are many potential solutions, no right or wrong answers only better or worse ones.
• Much of the work needs to be about framing the problem. Frame the problem in a customer centric way! This avoids creating features that work only for the business.
• Opportunities are customer pain points and desires
• Opportunity Space = Problem Space = Desire Space
• To reach a desired outcome - a product trio must discover and explore the opportunity space. The opportunity space is infinite. Problem framing is therefore important - how we frame a problem influences how we solve it. Try out many framings - explore how each impacts the solution space
• Two of the most important steps for reaching a desired outcome are first
1. How we map out and structure the opportunity space
2. How we select which opportunities to pursue
• Don’t skip these steps. Don’t start with an outcome and generate ideas.

The Underlying Structure of Discovery The Opportunity Solution Tree

The Opportunity Solution Tree is a visual representation of the paths you might take to reach a desired outcome.

Benefits of an Opportunity Solution Tree

How to Focus on Outcomes not Outputs

• Product teams will need to do discovery work to identify connections between product outcomes (metrics they want to influence) and business outcomes (metrics that drive the business)
• Translate business outcomes into product outcomes that you can deliver.
• Negotiate appropriate product outcomes with leadership
• Determine when to set learning goals versus performance goals
• Focusing on outcomes is hard
• Don’t know how to measure the outcome
• Don’t know how to impact it - make it tractable
• Or if it’s the right outcome to pursue the first place. Managing by outcomes is only effective if you choose the right one
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Example: ‘Tails.com’ Retention Example

• Assign a team a business outcome - they might not be able to influence it without others ☹️
• Assign a team a product outcome - great - flexibility and autonomy to the team 🙂

• Benefits of Focusing on Product Outcomes
1. Autonomy - Gives the team autonomy to find the best solution (they have the expertise)
2. Anti-Fragility - you don’t need to know the solution, or you can be wrong
3. Measurement - becomes an important part of what you do
4. Teams make faster progress - don’t have to wait for lagging metric to work through
5. Control - teams are in control of Product Outcomes
6. Reduces communication overheads
• Outcomes are the result of a two-way negotiation between the team and the product leader
• Product leader brings the business view - what’s most important for the business
• Product trio bring the customer and technology knowledge
• Negotiation typically includes discussion on:
• Expected gains, risk, resources, approach, removing competing priorities, time to expected results, discovery time.
• If the business want more impact. That normally results in bigger bets and a bigger chance of failure.
• During the negotiation - we shouldn’t be talking about solutions - this should emerge from discovery
• Those that participate in the setting of their own outcomes take more ownership

• Shift your product leader toward an outcome mindset. Situation ↓ Response.
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Product Leader asks team to deliver outputs (not outcomes)
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Product Leader sets outcomes BUT with little input from team
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Team set outcomes BUT with little input from product leader
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Team negotiates outcomes with product leader 🙂

Discovering Opportunities - Opportunity Space

The Experience Map - Visualising What You Know

• Steps to building your experience map
• Start individually to avoid groupthink - Develop your own perspective
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Visual not verbal - externalise your thinking - so you can examine it
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Explore the diverse perspective of your team
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Co-Create a shared experience map
• Avoid these common anti-patterns
• Getting bogged down in debate
• Using words instead of visuals
• Moving forward as if your map is true
• Forgetting to refine and evolve your map as you learn more

Continuous Interviewing

Mapping the Opportunity Space

• With each interview the structure of the opportunity space continues to evolve. Keep interviewing until patterns emerge

The Opportunity Solution Tree

• Tree’s can tame backlogs.
• A flat list of opportunities is hard to prioritise. Some are interrelated, some are a subset of others. Some don’t come with clear solutions - some do. Much of that nuance is lost in a flat list
• The tree helps us expose and understand the complexity of the opportunity space
• A tree shows ‘Parent-child’ and ‘Sibling’ relationships

• Helps us group customer needs - deconstruct the problem
• Breaks big opportunities into a series of smaller ones
• Allows us to tackle problems that seem unsolvable
• Allows us to deliver value over time
• Start by choosing easy things with large impact. Focus on shipping value over time.
• Solve enough smaller opportunities and you’ll have solved the larger one
• The tree helps asses and prioritise opportunities and make fast decisions

Prioritising Opportunities, Not Solutions

You are never one feature away from success - and you never will be.

• We focus too much on the solution space - on shipping the next release. We assume that success comes from launching features - this is the build trap.
• Product strategy doesn’t happen in the solution space - it happens in the opportunity space. A solution-first mindset is good at producing outputs not outcomes.
• Customers don’t care about the majority of our releases. They care about their needs, pain points and desires
• Product strategy emerges from the decisions we make about... which outcomes to pursue, which customers to serve and which opportunities to address.
• Sadly many teams jump past this, and start prioritising features

Discovering Solutions - Solution Space

Idea Generation and Selection

Identifying Hidden Assumptions

• Knowing what assumptions you’re making is the biggest barrier to testing them

Types of Assumptions

Testing Assumptions, Not Ideas

• Gather evidence and test assumptions for your top 3 ideas at the same time - this helps us not fall in love with one idea

It’s not science, our goal is to mitigate risk - not to seek truth. Our bar can be lower

Measuring the impact

• Don’t get distracted by your assumption tests - stay true to solving your outcome
• Discovery and delivery are iterative - you’re never done with discovery
• Iteratively invest in experiments. Start small and grow your investment over time.
• As experiments grow, you’re going to need to test them with a real audience

• Don’t try to measure everything at the start - learn as you go

Managing the cycles

• Continuous discovery isn’t sequential. It’s often circular and more messy.
• The fruit of discovery work is often the time we save when we decide not to build something
• Sometimes customers want something - but don’t expect your brand to solve that problem for them

• Iterate through small opportunities for big impact

Show Your Work

The more leaders can understand where teams are, the more they will step back and let teams execute

• Get your stakeholders on board - else everything else is wasted

• Continuously manage your stakeholders
• Showing your visual decision making progress takes your stakeholders along for the journey
• Don’t present a conclusion, show your process, which leads to more buy-in and long-term success

Developing Your Continuous Discovery Habits

Start Small and Iterate

• I rarely had the support of senior leadership to do product discovery well.
• Find a way to get closer to the customer - find a way to advocate for human-centred design.
• I had a strong sense of agency - you choose how you work - you might not be able to change the way companies work.
• Instead of asking for permission - start small and iterate from there
• Build your trio - don’t work alone - build the relationships yourself - start small with them
• Start talking to customers - it’s the keystone habit - weekly changes everything - continuous interviewing
• Work Backward - As you work on requirements for the solutions you were asked to build, story map your ideas - use them to identify hidden assumptions - be aware of your assumptions
• Identify assumptions with stakeholders - the idea will improve right then and there
• Document what impact people think a feature will have
• Do post-release impact reviews (expected impact vs actual impact)
• Are we trying to solve a customer problem with this feature?
• The best time to advocate for discovery is when a feature falls short of expectations
• Never say ‘I told you so’ - be a collaborative problem solver
• Use retrospectives to reflect and improve
• What did we lean in this period that surprised us
• How could we have learned sooner?

Quotes:

If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions Albert Einstein

Managers must convert society’s needs into opportunities for profitable business Peter Drucker

Too often we have many competing goals, that all seem equally important Christina Wodtke - Radical Focus

People don’t know what you want until you show it to them. Our task its to read things that are not yet on the page Steve Jobs