Collaborating to get the best out of the product team. Getty image via Unsplash+

How continuous product discovery reduces risk by bridging strategy and user needs

“I don’t care what some random customers told you. You’re going to build what I tell you to build.”

We had started out as a small, scrappy, underdog team, with all the “big guns” assigned to other, higher-profile teams. We were so far below the radar that no one gave us a second thought

All we had going for us was heart and dual-track continuous product discovery and delivery.

Which was great because we were empowered and autonomous enough to learn from stakeholders and clients without having our choices dictated. 

This helped us go from a tiny initial Minimum Viable Product (“MVP”), AND continuously test and iterate with end-users to scale across the country to millions of successful client interactions.

On the radar

This success brought us to the attention of a leader who tasked us with a major new initiative.

So we ran our Continuous Discovery playbook. Our Product Trio interviewed users, then rapidly tested and iterated several prototypes of the UX and flow to share with users.

We identified one version that converted better and shared it with our stakeholder. 

Immediately, we could tell they had different ideas.

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My way…

As they pushed back on our tested flow, we shared: 

“But we have 10 people who preferred & successfully got through this flow.”

At this, the leader lost their patience and scrapped our flow we had designed and tested with our “Ideal Customer Profile” (“ICP”) end-user clients.

…or the highway

After trashing our designs, the leader spent hours directing the team to design their own set of pages.

I found the whole situation ironic. Without continuous product discovery, we never would have come to this leader’s attention. And yet, from our first interaction, we faced classic command and control management.

We had little choice but to code the leader’s prescribed flow and push it live.

Numbers don’t lie

Immediately, we could tell something was off.

Our conversions for these experiences were generally solid, but this flow was getting unusually low traction. After several weeks, our leader had moved on, so we switched back to the version that emerged from discovery.

Conversions once again picked up.

This is how it’s done most of the time

This leader had a great track record and a string of successes that led to their lofty role in the org.

Even more interestingly, the differences between what they told us to build and what the team arrived at through discovery weren’t all that great. 

In both cases, we ended up with a few pages with form fields, text, images, and graphics.

Discovered vs. Dictated

The difference was in how we arrived at the selection and arrangement of the elements on those screens.

How could any one person pretend to have all the answers for the exact “right” way to design and build any flow?

The point is that no one ever knows up front– everything is a bet.

In Continuous Discovery, we recognize that and instead start with humility and curiosity about your end users’ needs, involving both them and stakeholders in the process.

Collaborating with customers up front makes it far easier to build something our users will recognize was created with their needs in mind, not just ours.

Co-creative success

In this piece, we’ll review the challenges every collaborative effort faces, how legacy management models inadvertently increase risk, and what to do instead.

There are risks that can undermine us every time we build something, jeopardizing the time and money we invest.

One helpful model that guided us throughout was the awareness that every product faces four fundamental risks.

The Risks Every Product Faces

Marty Cagan encapsulated The Four Big Risks we deal with in product:

1. Value Risk: Does the customer see the value in what we’re showing them? This is without a doubt the biggest risk, and the accountability of the Product Manager.
2. Usability Risk: Can the customer find and figure out how to use the feature? This is the responsibility of the UX Lead.
3. Feasibility Risk: Can we build this, with the platform, technology, and engineering cycles we have available? 
   This is the responsibility of the Tech Lead/Architect
4. Business Viability Risk: Does this functionality make us money? Is it ethical? Does it conform to our internal Governance, Risk, and Compliance guidelines? 
   Again, this is the responsibility of the Product Manager. 

With two out of the four big risks to get ahead of, this is another reason the product role is so challenging.

The only way to succeed is to become aware of these risks and employ the right strategies to get ahead of them up front.

But unfortunately, traditional management models focus more on commanding and being obeyed.

The challenges of traditional leadership models

Legacy Enterprises are largely dominated by stakeholder-driven management cultures where software teams are given features to build by more senior business leaders.

Despite being far removed from actual end users, these leaders see it as their right, privilege, and responsibility to tell their software teams exactly what should be built 

And it’s the team’s responsibility to simply do what they’re told.

The unique value leaders offer

Experienced business people have a wealth of crucial business and strategic context, but in the classic model, the full value of what they have to offer isn’t used effectively.

While they’re busy telling others what to do, they miss the opportunity to share the important leadership priorities and strategic context their people need to make better supporting choices.

At the same time, when teams passively accept detailed instructions, they turn off their own creativity and initiative and achieve a form of learned helplessness.

This may be appropriate in some situations, but in the complex learning work businesses need to succeed, the biggest tragedy is they lose out on the innovation and engagement they could have gotten from everyone across the team.

“I’ve long said that if you’re just using your engineers to code, you’re only getting about half their value.”

Marty Cagan, “The Most Important Thing”

Is it any surprise that these outdated management models so rarely achieve the goals set for them?

And what can we do instead?

Continuous Discovery at the center

There are three things we can do to turn the tide:

1. Start from strategy

2. Discover Continuously with Customers

3. Lead Differently & Empower

Together, they provide a powerful combination for organizational collaboration.

1. Start from Strategy

One of the biggest problems with the conventional model is that people are told “what” to do, without any understanding of why. 

This is where strategy is so crucial.

Without getting into all the elements of strategy, these are most important foundations you need to know:

1. It’s a problem-solving framework
2. It’s a set of choices centered around our “Where to Play” and “How to Win”
3. Its goal is to influence that which is out of our control: client behavior
4. In ways that will create success for clients, as well as for our business

Play to Win

I have a strong preference for and am certified in the “Playing to Win” strategy framework, which checks all these boxes.

Click here to get the “Playing to Win” Strategy Choice Cascade framework as a Notion template to design your own winning Personal Strategy.

Answering five questions can help us form the foundation of key strategic choices and how to bring them to life (our “execution”) in the same lightweight, single-page document format.

But ultimately, it doesn’t matter which strategic framework you use.

Focus on choices

Your strategy will have a chance of success as long as you account for these fundamentals in an integrated way, make sure the choices work together, and have a clear understanding of how to make them happen.

This is how we can start to make the most of what we have work for us—by making a set of strategic choices and pulling together the necessary pieces into an integrated whole. 

Our strategic choices will form a crucial decision-making framework through the next few steps.

2. Discover Continuously

With our strategic context set, we can now use these choices in continuous discovery and delivery to stay ahead of the Four Big Risks.

By starting with a problem or an opportunity to solve for a specific person or group, and working backwards from that, we work towards achieving an outcome – a change in customer behavior that means success both for them, as well as for our business.

Rather than starting with a random feature we’ve decided to build when the least is known.

Teresa Torres has framed the foundations of continuous product discovery as “The Product Trio,” representing Product, UX, and Tech leadership collaboratively:

• Speak with the customers identified in your strategic choices
• Map the Opportunity Space
• Test assumptions

Speak regularly with the right customers 

If you do nothing else in continuous discovery except regularly speak with your target “ICP” users, the solutions your teams build can’t help but improve. 

Through this regular customer contact, we inevitably uncover insights neither we nor they knew existed. This helps us align with their needs and help us begin creating better solutions for our customers’ needs.

But we’ll need a framework for understanding how their needs and ours’ can work together. 

For this, we’ll need a visual way to map and connect these needs.

Showing our thinking with Opportunity Solution Trees

Teresa Torres’ significant innovation is to use the Opportunity Solution Tree to map the entire flow from our business objectives down to the assumptions we make underlying the solutions we build. 

This is how we bring our strategic choices to life.

Tracing the thread at the top from Business Impact at the top, which measures our organization’s success and achievement.

Through Customer Outcomes – That indicate success both for them, as well as for our Business.

To Customer Opportunities – This is where we can use and match our strategic choices to our clients’ needs. 

And the Solutions we create to address those Opportunities.

The difference is we begin by working backward from client Opportunities (“Problems”) instead of predetermined solutions, the exact approach behind Amazon’s successful product development process.

The Big Breakthrough of Mapping the Opportunity Space

Another of Teresa Torres’ major breakthroughs reflected in the Opportunity Solution Tree is mapping and testing the assumptions underlying our proposed solutions.

Never before have we had a way to understand and visualize the complete logic flow from our proposed solutions to what we hope they’ll achieve. 

This is something completely missing from traditional stakeholder-driven leadership models.

3. Lead differently & empower

As we saw in our team’s example, we miss so much crucial context the team could use to build better features and products when we jump directly to a solution, 

Sadly, too much seems invested in the old stakeholder model.

But it’s obvious no one person can know everything necessary to keep us ahead of the Four Big Risks. We recognize the need for new leadership models that bring together the best of leadership’s strategic business context with the team’s technical and design strengths.

But there is an established model of what great leadership looks like, and it has nothing to do with telling people what to do.

Don’t command – share intent

Ironically, the most appropriate model for leading software teams to stay ahead of the Four Big Risks comes not from business but from the military.

This approach, laid out in L. David Marquet’s book “Turn the Ship Around” and General Stanley McChrystal’s “Team of Teams,” focus on setting “strategic intent.”

The best way to understand this would be a leader with a group on a journey, arriving at a river and having to figure out how to get everyone across.

Two ways of crossing

The leader can either command their team in detail:

“Build me a bridge, made of concrete and wood, 10 meters wide, 50 meters long, 4 meters above the water, with the strength to hold at least 4,000 kilos.”

Or they can say:

“Team, figure out a way to get us across the river.”

It comes back to the same fundamental: Inspire the broader team with a problem to solve and collaborate with them on a solution.

But teams will also have to step up in different ways to make this model work.

Empower with Direction

As teams are discovering insights during Continuous Discovery, this information will be useless if they’re unable to act on it.

For this reason, it’s important to empower teams to make decisions based on what they learn. 

But a key component of this new way of collaborating will require teams to share their learnings with leadership so they can make any necessary strategic pivots.

Making the leap

Many leaders will be uncomfortable shifting to a model where they give up control, tasking teams to solve problems instead of building specific features.

For this model to work, teams will have to earn leadership’s trust and demonstrate their capacity for collaborating and taking on more decision-making responsibility. 

In this way, we open the door to making the best use of the natural strengths of each.

Using the advantages

Teams have the advantage of being closest to customers, together with their design and technical expertise. 

But teams need clarity on the higher-level strategic context to make the right decisions from moment to moment.

Stakeholders have years of experience and the necessary strategic context horizontally and vertically across the business. This gives them a unique understanding of  how the different parts of the business come together to make money. 

But leaders need to understand customers and what’s possible from a technical perspective so they can continuously adjust their strategy.

Takeaways

We now have a different model for collaborative software delivery:

When we:

1. Start from strategy

2. Discover Continuously with Customers

3. Lead Differently & Empower

By collaborating through continuous discovery, and making our thinking visible through the opportunity space, we can bring our overarching strategy to life.

It will require leadership to no longer pretend they have all the answers, but to see that teams are clear on the strategic context and effective in bringing clients into the process of collaboration and discovery while sharing what they learn along the way.

It goes without saying that teams will need strong leadership at the team level in the form of an experienced Product Manager leading an effective Product Trio.

This is the crucial role of product management—to foster a new dynamic based on collaborating, communicating, and co-creating with users and stakeholders in the process of continuous discovery.

This can allow us to not only create better solutions that stay ahead of the Four Big Risks but, for the first time, start unleashing the potential power lying asleep within our teams and bring our strategy to life.