For years, I’ve shared that Product Talk’s primary outcome is to increase the number of product teams who adopt a continuous cadence to their discovery work.
This has been our North Star metric. It has guided our work. It inspired me to write my book. It’s what motivates me to launch new courses and refine our existing lineup. It’s what encouraged me to create a gathering place for our community of CDH practitioners.
While this has been a great directional outcome, I’ve struggled with how to make it more measurable.
Today, I’m excited to announce my first step in correcting for that: We have launched our first ever CDH Benchmark Survey. And I need your help.
But first, I want to tell you why this survey matters.
Understanding Reality: We Don’t Live in an Ideal World
I see a lot of criticisms on Twitter and elsewhere about how thought leaders in the product space write about an ideal world that most product people don’t live in.
There’s truth to that criticism. Most product teams still aren’t managed by outcomes, talking to customers regularly, or testing their assumptions (or even testing their ideas).
But we have made progress. That progress, however, isn’t always visible.
If you’ve never worked at a company that manages by outcomes, if you’ve never experienced the value of talking to customers week over week, if you’ve never experienced the ups and downs of assumption testing, I can see why this all feels foreign to you.
But many product teams are working this way. As William Gibson allegedly said, “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.”
I want to shine a spotlight on that. I want to put some real numbers behind this. And that’s where you can help.
If you are a product manager, designer, engineer, user researcher, or in any other role that contributes to building a product, read on for two ways you can help me shine a spotlight on how we are doing as an industry.
And if you are worried that your team doesn’t do enough discovery to participate, please let that go. I want to hear from all teams, regardless of where they are in their discovery journey. After all, that’s how we get a clear picture of reality.
Tell Us About Your Team’s Discovery Habits
First, I’d love for you to take the survey. It takes about 7 minutes to complete.
If you need a little more incentive to complete the survey, I’ll be raffling off over $5,000 in prizes:
- 1 ticket to any upcoming Master Class: Continuous Discovery Habits (valued at $1,795)
- 3 tickets to any of our Deep Dive courses—winner’s choice (each valued at $799)
- 5 annual subscriptions to the CDH Membership program (each valued at $199)
There will be a total of 9 winners and your survey response enters you into the raffle.
Help Spread the Word: Share the Survey with Friends & Colleagues
Second, I’d love to collect thousands of responses and I know I can’t do that alone. I’d love for you to share the survey with your friends and colleagues who work in the industry. I’ve pulled together a few different ways you can share.
To share on Twitter:
Share details about your team’s discovery habits and earn a chance to win 1 of 9 prizes (over $5,000 in value).
Take the survey: https://producttalk.org/cdh-benchmark – Tweet This
To share on LinkedIn, click share on the following post:
Please click through to this post and click share.
And by email—simply copy and paste the following message:
Hi friends and colleagues,
I just participated in the Continuous Discovery Habits Benchmark Survey. And thought you might like to as well.
Here’s why:
- Participation in the survey enters you to win a free course or membership from Product Talk Academy.
- It’s a fun way to share how your team does or doesn’t do discovery.
- Help us get a clear picture of where the industry stands.
- It only took 7 minutes. For real.
Don’t let this linger in your inbox. Take the survey now: https://producttalk.org/cdh-benchmark
[your name here]
P.S. If you want to learn more about this survey, check out Teresa Torres’s blog post about it.
And Finally, Tune in for the Results After the New Year
I’ll be sharing the results right here on Product Talk after the New Year.
So please take a few minutes to fill out the survey. And then share the survey through whatever mechanism works best for you.
Thank you! I sincerely appreciate it.