What did I learn from talking to a product discovery coach?
Product discovery is a topic I have spent a considerable time digging into last year. My research led me to read many books and talk to expert discovery coaches. One of the very prominent discovery coaches I have had the opportunity to talk with was Teresa Torres. Teresa is a discovery coach who helps teams adopt user-centered, hypothesis-driven product development practices. Teresa also writes extensively for Inc.com. That one conversation with her left a profound and indelible mark in me that changed the way I looked into product discovery ever since.
This post is a summary of all that I learnt from Teresa.
The best way to begin understanding product discovery is understanding dual-track development.
Dual track development
It is not possible to build products without doing both discovery and delivery. Discovery encompasses all the activities that we do to decide what to build. It includes all the decisions we make to decide what to build next, whereas delivery is all the activities we do to write code, package releases, ship products. It’s how we deliver value to our customers. Dual track development is the separation of product discovery from product delivery.
Marty Cagan defines discovery as "figuring out" what to build and delivery as "then building it".
In the last fifteen years, delivery practices have matured in a lot of ways - adoption of agile practices, continuous integration, continuous deployment, story mapping, user stories etc. All of that have contributed to make delivery practises stronger and better across the industry.
On the other hand product discovery practices hadn't matured much in all these years because most companies emphasized on delivery and under emphasized discovery.
Most companies overemphasize delivery and underemphasize discovery.
Rise of Modern Product Discovery
In the last few years however, a lot of forward strides have been made on the discovery space with the advent of customer development, design thinking, the Lean Startup, Jobs to be Done Framework etc. Each of these are designed to help us decide better on what to build.
But why has this shift happened lately?
The way products were built and sold have evolved over last several decades. Earlier, products were built and optimized for efficiency - case in point is assemble line in car manufacturing. Efficiency was their competitive differentiator. Soon the differentiating factor shifted towards distribution and time to market. With the advent of Internet, distribution and time to market seized to become a differentiator so the only differentiator was on building the right products. And this why we saw discovery practices mature and became all the more crucial to meet this changing need. These practices help you answer what are the opportunities that create the most value for your customer and most value for your business.
The modern product discovery philosophies come with a common set of assumptions.
They assume that the focus should be on the customer’s needs and not just on the needs of the business.
They assume that our initial ideas, initiatives, or products will be wrong.
They acknowledge that we need a deep understanding of our customers and that we need to invite them to participate with us in the creation of our solutions.
They assume that we need to iteratively test our ideas and that we should only invest further as the data coming back warrants.
The biggest takeaway from the entire one hour conversation with Teresa was this:
Product Management is evolving very quickly and if you are spending time writing user stories and grooming backlogs, I dont think you are doing the heart of the work. I think what you're gonna find in the coming years is that the delivery side of product management is going to be taken over by the PMO teams and by engineers themselves. And I really think that the future of product management is on the discovery side and really focussing on discovering opportunities and right solutions.
I asked Teresa the following question for her above stated opinion:
"Does that mean Teresa that of all the various skills product managers need to develop, the discovery skills become the most important?"
If I was a product manager early in my career, I would focus a 100% of my energy in getting good at product discovery. And here's why. If you think about where you can create the most unique value for your company, its in helping your company identify where they can create the most value for your customers. Ideally, our business makes money when we create value for our customers. And if you think about what's the higher impact, higher leverage activity, its uncovering that value, way more than how well you write user stories and how well you keep engineering team on track.
And frankly, there are other people in the organization who can and should do that wheres we can argue that there aren't a lot of people that have the luxury and skillset to focus on understand the customers, their problems, and the business and synthesizing all of that information to create the most value.
Here's the complete interview with Teresa Torres. Do listen to it. It's a treasure trove.