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. 
I continue to be surprised by how many product managers aren’t familiar with dual-track development.
I don’t care if you know the buzzwords or if you can define the difference between product discovery and product delivery.
But if you work in product management, you should know that a fundamental shift has been happening in our field for years. And it’s time you start exploring that shift.
The Lean Startup came out in 2011. That’s five years ago.
Design thinking predates that by many years. As does user research and customer development.
And yet, almost every day I meet product managers who spend little to no time talking to customers. They think experiments belong in science labs. And they still haven’t prioritized instrumenting their products.
I understand that many organizations have barriers to adopting these practices. It’s not easy for an individual product manager to enact change within their organization.
I get it. I help organizations through this shift every day. It’s what I do for a living. And it’s hard.
But every single product manager should be aware that this shift is happening in our industry. And regardless of what is happening at your company today, if you want to keep being a product manager tomorrow, you need to be investing in the skills that are required to do modern product discovery.
Video: An Introduction to Product Discovery
To help build awareness and to move the conversation forward, I’ve created a 25-minute video that walks through an introduction to modern product discovery.
Even if you get it, even if you talk to customers every day or run a dozen A/B tests a week, I want to encourage you to watch it.
Some companies are starting to kick ass at this. This is the future of product management. Are you ready to keep up?
If you can’t see the embedded video, click here.
In this introduction to product discovery, you’ll learn:
- What modern product discovery is (in a big-picture sense)
- How most people are deciding what to build—and the limitations of this model
- What some of the best product teams are doing differently—and how you can implement their methodology
- Which artifacts can be used to build a deep understanding of the customer’s world that’s shared across your team, promotes empathy, and helps everyone retain information
- How to uncover your own underlying assumptions—and how to test them
As product managers, our initial ideas fall short most of the time. It takes work to evolve ideas into something that will work. But if we aren’t experimenting and measuring the impact of our product changes, we remain in the dark about our mediocre ideas.
Traditionally, product teams have followed the same methods, working under assumptions that have often led them astray. In this video, I’ll outline those assumptions and uncover why they can lead to costly mistakes and wasted resources.
I’ll also share how the most forward-thinking product teams are doing things differently. There are two dimensions to modern product discovery, and the video goes into specific examples of each of those dimensions as well as a few techniques to ensure that your team becomes equally proficient in both.
Throughout the video, I draw upon concepts from The Lean Startup, Change by Design, and The Four Steps to the Epiphany as well as what I’ve observed as a discovery coach and as product manager. I’ll reveal some of the common pitfalls that prevent teams from fully adopting modern product discovery and how you can make sure to avoid them. And, of course, I’ll share some best practices that I highly recommend following.
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I suspect that in many cases that there is enough activity associated with product discovery versus product delivery that it is unreasonable to expect a single person called product manager to handle it all
Jason,
Thanks for your comment. I agree. A product manager can’t do all of the discovery work and manage all of delivery. But I wouldn’t split these two roles. When teams do that, they get the same handoffs you see in waterfall where the discovery PM hands off product requirements to the delivery PM.
Instead, I encourage teams to take a team approach to both. The PM / UX lead / Tech lead all need to be responsible for discovery and delivery. These three share the discovery work. When this happens it also alleviates concerns in delivery. With the tech lead involved in discovery, he or she can answer many of the questions that arise in delivery that often end up going to a product manager.
Great video Teresa! Many of us in Salt Lake City have been working to bring the benefits of dual track development to our companies. I’m excited to have another resource to help get the message out.
Very good introduction to the topic! Thank you for the effort.
Being PM myself I am surprised how little understanding there is in our industry about product discovery and dual track development. Specially in Europe, which is majorly lagging behind in terms of best PM practices.
Hopefully together we can gradually build that understanding and make better products more efficiently. Good luck!
The good news is this is changing quickly. More and more companies are starting to ask the right questions.
Great presentation Teresa! Nice way of tying a bunch of concepts together in the context of dual track development. I’m curious if you have recommendations on how to manage this process? We struggle with the volume of evidence we have collected in the past and wading through it to inform our next steps.
Hi Nate, see this article: http://www.producttalk.org/2016/08/opportunity-solution-tree/
I use that tree structure to guide the discovery work. Will be writing much more on how to use it and will include other models for how to synthesize research, experimental data, soon.
That article is actually how I found your blog in the first place; also great read. I was curious if there were nay tools you recommended to mange this data: interviews, user testing etc.?
This is highly specific to how each team works and what tools they like to use. I like to see a combination of low-fidelity visuals on the walls where people sit all day so the research takeaways are always visible and a digital archive solution. This could be Confluence, Google Docs, Trello. Whatever works for the team.
I don’t have great recommendations for research specific tools.
Hi Teresa, great video. My company is currently looking for someone with experience in Discovery. If you have any recommendation of employment agencies that could assist us in identifying a qualified applicant. Our location – NJ or NYC. Many thanks
Hi Irene,
Unfortunately, I’m not too familiar with employment agencies. But I’ve added “what to look for in a strong discovery product manager” to my future topic list. 🙂
You should consider posting a transcript for ths
Hey Teresa –
Thanks for putting together this video. I feel like people have a tendency to re-create the product discovery process with each new engagement, and it’s nice to have a framework to streamline things along.
We just wrote on article on the Discovery Process here (we’re a product development consultancy), and thought it may have additional value to your audience. If you think your viewers would get anything out of it, feel free to share.
https://blog.mojotech.com/how-to-successfully-kick-off-your-discovery-process/
Either way, hope you have a great week.
Brandyn