Thread by @SparklesJohnny

Our #product discovery process wasn't working. We had some wins with problems we understood well, but as we increased how fast we were moving it stopped working.

Here's what I think we were doing wrong and what we are trying now:

#prodmgmt #productmanagement

We plan quarterly and were starting discovery about six weeks out from the start of the next quarter. This meant that we had to pick a problem to solve for next quarter, research it, ideate and validate solutions with users, and slice up the work all within six weeks.

This was obviously nowhere near enough time. The first time we did it with a designer involved I knew the problem very well and the solution was simple. We tested it with customers and the feedback was positive.

But the quarter after that I didn't know the problem in-depth because it hadn't been hanging around for ages. We had jumped onto a new problem a few weeks before the quarter started and had to do discovery as we built. We've been trying to recover ever since.

The process we'd developed had us doing some discovery and design on what we were currently building for the first six weeks of the quarter, and then switching to discovery for the next quarter in the final six weeks.

This is what we thought 'continuous discovery' meant (I'm not sure where I got that idea from). We were aware of dual-track scrum and continuous discovery, but had no idea what that actually looked like in practice. We just knew we had to have discovery and delivery tracks...

So what are we doing now? We've started the process from sprint 1 of each quarter with me presenting a problem statement(s) to the team. We discuss the problem statements and identify any assumptions and map them using an assumption map mural.co/blog/intro-ass…

From here we plan our research with our UX Researcher. They help us understand the problem in more depth and test our assumptions. We have a really intensive research schedule for this quarter we are in, so it will be interesting to see how this goes.

Once we've understood more about the problem our designer is going to lead some ideation sessions involving the whole team to come up with some solutions to build.

I (PM) will work with the designer and tech lead to work out which solutions we should test on users. They will be developed into clickable prototypes and go through user testing. We may also need to do some other research alongside this.

These will be tested with users and re-worked or discarded based on the feedback. I'll then slice up the work in a user story map and the team will do a high-level estimation using affinity estimation.

So far we are staying on track with our schedule. I'm still a bit nervous about what we do if something goes wrong, but I think we are in a better position overall. I got bitten last quarter by not doing validation and we haven't achieved the outcomes we wanted.

I don't think we've increased our work, just stretched it out over the quarter. It gives the designer and UX researcher more time to prepare and run research, design, and validation. It also gives the tech lead time to think about things.

How are you doing product discovery?