Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. When you conduct story-based interviews every week, you quickly begin to collect a range of opportunities. And while some of these opportunities might be related to your current outcome, that’s not always the case.
It can be hard to know what to do when this happens.
You might be tempted to try to guide your customer back to talking about your current outcome, but that doesn’t necessarily work.
Sometimes you’re early in your discovery journey and you’re still developing your understanding of the opportunity space. Sometimes this conversation helps you uncover nuance in the customer’s context that you weren’t previously aware of. And sometimes customers are set on telling you a specific story and nothing you say or ask them will veer them off their course.
No matter what the reason, you end up with the same dilemma: a list of opportunities that fall outside the scope of your current outcome.
Craig Fogel, a product manager at Convo and a member of the CDH Community, asked the question that inspired today’s Ask the Community post. He realized that his regular customer interviews provided him with plenty of promising opportunities that weren’t related to the outcome his team was focused on at the time and he wondered what to do with them. In this post, we’ll share both advice from the community and Teresa’s take on the topic.
Question: What do you do with opportunities that come up often but don’t relate to the outcome you’re driving? Do you just let them keep piling up? Do you look for a way to justify working on them with that outcome? Do you come up with another outcome to work on later?
Here’s what several members of the CDH community and Teresa had to say in response.
Teresa’s Take: Remember the Two Ways to Synthesize What You Learn in Interviews
Teresa shared a short video she had recorded on the topic.
In this video, Teresa says it’s important to use different ways of synthesizing what you learn during interviews:
- Create interview snapshots right after you conduct an interview to capture what you heard and what you think is actionable from the interview, even if you can’t act on it now.
- Look across interview snapshots to identify which opportunities are related to your outcome and select those opportunities to go on your opportunity solution tree.
In other words, your interview snapshots capture what you’re learning and your opportunity solution tree is your active space for your current outcome.
Advice from the Community: Sort Opportunities and Address Them Strategically
The advice from the community fell into two main categories: What to do if your opportunities are bug fixes/maintenance requests or what to do if they’re related to a larger, more strategic opportunity.
Tackle maintenance requests on a regular basis
Some of the opportunities you encounter might be bugs or customer pain points that are relatively easy to address. If this is the case, you can potentially address them when you’re doing this type of maintenance work.
Jenny Tommsdatter Gabrielsen, a Senior Content Designer at Gjensidige Insurance in Norway, shared that her team cycles between two weeks working on their prioritized outcome and one week of working on maintenance. “In the maintenance week, we do bug fixes, technical improvements, as well as small fixes that will improve the customer’s experience. So if the things that come up in the interviews are relatively easy to fix, we try to do them in the maintenance week.”
Teresa added that Jenny’s maintenance weeks reminded her of something she’s experienced as a customer and loved. The course platform provider for Product Talk Academy, LearnWorlds, does a “customer love” release every quarter that features a bunch of small changes that were directly requested by customers.
Teresa wrote, “Here’s why I like it: It’s easy to think that customers don’t know what they want and that we should only build things that come out of our discovery work. There is truth to that. Customers are rarely the best people to design a solution that will work for most of the market. But this doesn’t mean that everything that they suggest is a bad idea.”
In this situation, the team takes in a bunch of requests every quarter or two, evaluates which ones have the most potential, implements them, batches them into a release, and does a blog post where they shout out the customers who requested the changes.
Learning platform provider LearnWorlds takes input from customers, periodically makes updates based on what they hear, and publishes blog updates that personally thank the customers whose input they acted on. Click the image to see a larger version.
According to Teresa, “This is a great way to knock out all those small changes that you know you should get to but never do (because they aren’t related to your outcome). And it builds a TON of goodwill among your customer base. The key to making this work well is to make sure that you vet the requests and iterate on them based on what works for the product overall.”
Consider ways to capture other opportunities that you will revisit regularly
But not all opportunities can be addressed by quick maintenance fixes. What should you do in those situations?
Matt O’Connell, Co-founder at Vistaly, has some suggestions. He says Vistaly approaches this in two ways:
- They have a list of what they call “Unmapped” opportunities. Each of those opportunities links back to the related interview snapshots.
- They also have a KPI/Metric Tree that sits above their opportunity solution trees. They do not have an outcome driving every possible metric, but they regularly place opportunities in the ballpark area of where they believe they would roughly fit when they switch focus to that area of the business/product. “When we revisit that area, we’ll look at who said what (by looking at all the snapshots related to those opportunities) and pull in ones that make sense so we don’t start from scratch,” explains Matt.
At Vistaly, opportunities that don’t relate to the current outcome get recorded and grouped with similar ideas so it’s easy to revisit them in the future. Click the image to see a larger version.
He adds that he likes the KPI/Metric Tree because “Flat lists (to me) always felt like a place where things go to die. Also, there is not always a clean place to fit opportunities in your current mental model of how the business works (KPI Tree).”
Teresa adds, “I like associating unrelated opportunities with the metric or outcome that they are related to. If you have a good system for doing this, then it means when you ultimately do focus on that outcome, you aren’t starting from scratch. You already have a collection of opportunities to start from.”
We regularly tackle questions like this in the Continuous Discovery Habits Community. If you’re looking for a safe space where you can share your challenges and get feedback from like-minded peers, come join us there!
