Thoughts on Continuous Discovery
I am so inspired by Teresa Torres and her book Continuous Discovery Habits. There are more good, solid, battle-tested ideas coming from her…
I am so inspired by Teresa Torres and her book Continuous Discovery Habits. There are more good, solid, battle-tested ideas coming from her than any Twitter product pundit or VC.
An Amazon link is below, and one for a video. Order the book then watch the video. In about 20 minutes she will give you a recipe for automating the process of scheduling weekly customer interviews for your continuous discovery process. This could change your life!
For me, continuous discovery resonates strongly with how I think about radical customer focus. Here are how some of those ideas have stuck together:
1) The process of engaging with users to discover and understand their needs is continuous and ongoing. In a modern, nimble product org, it’s like good health and hygiene: These are choices you should be making every day. The idea that discovery happens at the beginning of a project is an obsolete hangover from waterfall methodology.
2) It is too easy to become an expert in your product or your domain and believe that this means you are an expert about your customers. Every hour that you spend focusing on your product instead of your customers makes you more like your colleagues and *less* like your customers. Continuous customer focus restores and maintains a healthy balance.
3) I have found it very easy to get hung up on how hard it is to optimize *how* we connect with our customers. In fact, one time I even made an entire deck about all of the little practical obstacles I’d have to overcome if I was going to prefect our customer interviews process. Ugh!
Eventually I got tired of working on that presentation and I just started emailing customers directly and booking calls with them myself. In a week or two, I had the Zoom webinar options figured out. Then I started inviting a couple of other PM’s to attend, and then some others. That’s better progress than I was ever going to make in a presentation.
4) There is no substitute for engaging directly with customers. But it’s not a bad idea to also engage directly with your colleagues who are already engaging directly with customers every day: Your support and sales folks. Consider having discovery conversations with them where you focus the discussion on customer problems rather than the solution space, and see what you can learn.
5) Cognitive bias is a continuous hazard in situations where an inconsistent process is applied and the criteria are subjective. I have found it especially tempting to cherry-pick customer feedback that supports my own beliefs. It’s also very tempting to select customers for interviews who have completed one type of a survey or another, which is a textbook example of selection bias. Try to use a consistent process, and be objective in evaluating your responses.
In closing, this is a Teresa Torres stan account. Go buy the book, and watch the video.