Build better products with continuous product discovery

Kindergartners just start doing. They don't worry about their rules. They don't worry about who's in charge. They just brute force trial and error.

Opportunities emerge from our customers' stories. I don't think most people, when they're interviewing, they collect stories.

If your interview feels like you're having a beer with a buddy, that's a good sign. It should be that casual and that conversational.

You could run an entire interview by asking them one question.

One of the reasons why we get bad at interviewing, we're so worried about asking the next question, we stop listening to the interviewee.

What happens when you collect stories is you hear about things you would've never thought to ask about.

Everything in our backlog is a bet, everything. Whether we do discovery or not, everything is a bet. Discovery is helping us make a better bet.

Not all solutions need a lot of discovery. That's a common misunderstanding, I think.

"Them" refers to questions asked in user research interviews and surveys about user needs, preferences, and behaviors.

We're very good at answering them. Your brain will come up with a fast answer, but that answer doesn't necessarily reflect your behavior, and it misses context and nuance.

Product people are in the business of changing behavior, understanding and changing behavior.

If you want to make good decisions, we need options and we need to evaluate the pros and cons of each. The same is true in the product world.

Keep making bets. In parallel, start doing some discovery so that eventually those bets get better.

You're always delivering and you're always discovering. The more you build this discovery habit, the better those bets are going to get with time.

I think that the heart of good product is really getting comfortable in the problem space or the opportunity space, really taking the time to frame a problem well, and to really get into what's needed before we jump to solutions.

I can tell you that opportunity is an unmet need pain point or desire, and that's great. But I can tell you that 98% of people that write opportunities write them as solutions.

Even if you aren't being tasked with an outcome, if you do the work to understand these are the outcomes that matter to your business for your product, it's probably going to start with your business model, and then work to understand how the work that you're doing contributes to that.

How do I make it easier for them to do that than to not do that?