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. 
At the beginning of a new year, we’re often excited to make improvements and change our ways of working.
“This is the year when I’m going to adopt continuous discovery,” you might be saying to yourself. “I’m going to transform my product team and our entire approach to making product decisions!”
And while all that enthusiasm can be a good thing, trying to take on too much at once is rarely a recipe for success. Setting goals that are too ambitious or unrealistic is more likely to leave you feeling disappointed and frustrated.
A better approach is to think about changing our habits in small, sustainable ways. This is why Teresa likes to talk about continuous discovery habits. Rather than talking about “discovery” as one amorphous concept, she encourages product people to think about specific actions they can take to help them chip away at discovery, like talking to customers every week or identifying their assumptions.
In her keynote at Y Oslo, Teresa put it this way: “My book has ‘habits’ in the title. I can break this visual down into 11 habits. You don’t have to do every single habit for every single thing that you work on. I see too many teams try to do this perfectly, and then they do nothing.”
I recently came across the “SPICEY” framework by YouTube creator and author Nisha Vora. Nisha uses this framework as a way to think about changing your eating habits, but I quickly realized it can apply to continuous discovery habits, too.
Here’s the overview of the framework:
S – strategize
P – prep
I – implement
C – customize
E – embrace flexibility
Y – make it work for YOU
In this post, I’ll weave in some advice from Teresa along with some of the ways we’ve seen this work with different teams and people we’ve featured on the Product Talk blog over the years.
Part 1: Strategize by Choosing Easy Ways to Get Started
Before you take any specific actions, the first step is to strategize. Considering everything you already know about the continuous discovery habits, look for the easiest ways to get started. What’s something you can do today or this week? This should be a step (or a series of small steps) that doesn’t require too much preparation or permission from others.
Remember, you don’t have to (and really shouldn’t even try) to do everything at once. In her Product at Heart keynote, Teresa walked through three common scenarios and recommended the first habit to start with. Here’s a quick overview:
- If you work in a feature factory, you can start by identifying your hidden assumptions.
- If you’re in the messy middle, you can build momentum for change by creating a bright spot in your organization. You might achieve this with your product trio by interviewing customers together or automating the recruiting process.
- If you find yourself reverting to old habits, you can show your work to bring your stakeholders along with you as you do your discovery work.
Teresa recently began using the phrase “something is better than nothing.” In her Y Oslo keynote and fireside chat, she put it this way: “Find the teeniest, tiniest first step that you can take and then iterate your way from there. Trust me when I say I understand the time crunch. Our organizations are obsessed with speed and shipping and outputs, but we can start in as short as one 20- to 30-minute weekly session.”
And your strategizing shouldn’t stop there. Once you’ve decided what you’re going to do today or this week, try to plan out the following few steps. How will you continue to make progress and build on what you learn?
This might end up changing once you get started, and that’s fine, but you want to at least have a rough idea of your first few steps.
Part 2: Prep by Assembling the Team and Tools You’ll Need
With your rough plan in place, the next step involves preparation. In the case of discovery habits, you’ll need to assemble your team and tools. Who and what will you need to take your next steps?
For example, if you’re planning to work in a product trio, you’ll need to determine who will be participating. If you’d like to find customers to talk to, you may need a friendly peer from a customer-facing team or a tool you can use to contact customers directly. If your goal is to spend more time mapping opportunities, you’ll likely need a tool where you can build your opportunity solution trees. If you need inspiration for finding the right tool, be sure to check out our Tools of the Trade category here on Product Talk.
In your initial phases, it might be easiest (or necessary) to start with manual processes. Don’t let that stop you.
Just be aware that eventually you will probably want to find ways that you can automate processes and make them more scalable.
Here’s how Teresa describes the process of automating customer recruiting, for example:
“The big takeaway, though, is you want to set up a process… where an interview is showing up on your calendar every week and you didn’t have to do anything to get it there. It’s like your one-on-one. It’s on your calendar, you go to it. Your interview is on your calendar, you talk to a customer every week.”
Part 3: Implement Your Plan by Taking Action
This part is really simple. You just have to get started.
Whatever action you’ve decided on, this is the point where you take it. Map out your assumptions. Talk to a customer. Build an opportunity solution tree.
Of course, just because something is simple doesn’t mean that it’s easy. For many of us, the desire for perfection can be a real roadblock. Or maybe we get caught up in comparisons, hearing success stories from product peers at other companies that lead us to say, “That could never happen here.”
This type of thinking holds us back and prevents us from making any type of progress. It’s why Teresa cautions us not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Here’s how she recently phrased it: “There’s a toxic narrative that I’m seeing emerge in our industry that if you aren’t doing everything exactly right, you aren’t really doing your job. This is nonsense. Some of us work in challenging organizational contexts. Some of us work in more supportive organizational contexts. What good looks like is specific to your context. Focus on what you can do and stop comparing.”
Part 4: Customize Your Approach Based on What Works—And What Doesn’t
As soon as you start to take action, something magical will happen. Of course, it might not feel magical at the time. In fact, it will probably feel more like getting stuck or not making the impressive progress you were hoping for. But the magic here is that you’re learning what works and what doesn’t work in your specific context.
And you can use that information to iterate and improve.
Let’s consider a few real-life examples from people we’ve featured here on the Product Talk blog to help illustrate what customizing the habits can look like.
Yury experiments with customer outreach
Yury at HiveMQ recently shared his customer outreach story with us. Yury wanted to find customers to interview. He tried several tactics, including having product team members join existing customer touch points and leverage support tickets to schedule interviews. These were the first small steps he took. “But that only got us so far,” says Yury.
Next, he worked with a team of product managers and a product marketing manager to build an outreach campaign. They reached out to around 5,000 users from HiveMQ’s free plan, as well as several hundred marketing qualified leads (MQLs) from inbound leads.
But the campaign didn’t lead to the huge influx in interviews they’d anticipated. Yury says, “It was quite disappointing to learn that we managed to get only about three interviews as a result. That was pretty disheartening, and we didn’t see a repeatable path for setting up automation here. So we continued to have infrequent, reactive customer interviews for a few months.”
Yury’s initial steps didn’t yield the results he had hoped for. But he didn’t give up. Instead, he continued to look for other steps he could take.
Orbital allows you to set up pop-up messages that look like they’re coming directly from members of the product trio. Click the image to see a larger version.
And this is what led Yury to Orbital, a tool that allowed his team to automate in-app recruitment and get a steady stream of customers to interview.
Read more about Yury’s story here.
Sergio reconsiders the roles within the product trio
Generally when Teresa writes about product trios, she recommends that they should be durable (that is, they should have the same members over an extended period of time), because it takes time to establish trust and engage in the type of negotiation and group problem-solving that makes trios effective.
But Sergio at Ramsey Solutions encountered resistance from the engineers about working this way. Sergio shared his story about rethinking the role of engineers in the product trio.
The engineers at Ramsey Solutions feared that agreeing to participate in the product trio felt like an irreversible, one-way door decision.
Sergio says, “It felt like a fork in the road. It felt like a big decision. So we started asking, ‘How do we make it not feel like a big decision?’ And we decided that instead of it being a role, it could be a hat that someone’s wearing.”
He continues, “For these engineers, they’ve had a whole career in engineering, and we’re asking them to work in a completely different way, so I completely understand where they’re coming from. The idea of rotation is instead of trying to fight that perspective, let’s just embrace it and work within it, because there’s some merit to it as well.”
The solution they came up with? Instead of making participation in the product trio permanent, they would ask engineers to participate in the trio for a quarter or two. This would allow engineers to gain experience with discovery and share their perspective as part of the trio, but they wouldn’t feel like it was at the expense of their engineering career or keeping their technical skills up to date.
Read more about Sergio’s story here.
Amanda and Craig iterate on assumption tests
Amanda and Craig both work at Convo, where they were trying to run assumption tests with Deaf users via Zoom. They shared their story about going through several iterations of assumption tests until they found something that worked.
In these virtual settings, Craig (the PM) and Jason (the UX Designer) met with customers via Zoom and asked them to share their screen. But just the screen sharing alone proved challenging for some customers. Other customers seemed confused by the meta nature of the task: being asked to interact with their prototype and Zoom while already in Zoom.
“Initially we thought that maybe the icons on our buttons or the labels under them on our prototype were the problem,” says Craig. “Maybe the assumption that those were clear enough was false. After changing those and still seeing users struggle, we suspected that the test design (asking users to interact with Zoom while in a Zoom meeting) was causing confusion for testers. The way we were testing seemed to be getting in the way of testing the actual assumptions we were trying to test.”
But—you may be noticing a theme here—Craig and Amanda didn’t give up. Virtual assumption tests weren’t working, so they looked for other ways they could run them. They looked to another team member, Jason, who’d had some success with running small in-person tests.
Amanda set up a booth at Gallaudet University to recruit Deaf users in person.
With this new framing, Amanda volunteered to spend an afternoon at a nearby university to recruit participants for an in-person test and Craig redesigned the steps for administering the test. This new approach allowed them to recruit and conduct 20 tests within 5 hours.
Read more about Craig and Amanda’s story here.
Part 5: Embrace Flexibility—There’s No Single Right Way
The next step is all about embracing flexibility. Teresa often says that there’s no single right way to do discovery. Everyone will need to be flexible depending on their unique company and context, and that’s okay.
Here’s how Teresa explained it in a conversation with Product Talk coach Hope Gurion:
There’s this tenet from the Agile Manifesto that’s really important, which is that each team owns the way they work and they’re constantly iterating on it to make it better.
Even if we all share a common starting point, as soon as we start iterating as a team on how to make our work practices better, we’re all going to end up in different places. And that’s not a bad thing. It’s allowing each team to really find what’s going to work best for them. It’s really extending some of the Agile mindset, but also internalizing this continuous improvement mindset and applying it to how we work.
In their series of conversations on this topic, Teresa and Hope discussed the guiding principles of collaborative decision-making, externalizing your thinking, focusing on outcomes, continuous customer touch points, prioritizing the opportunity space (not the solution space), setting up compare and contrast decisions, and surfacing and testing assumptions. They argued that following the principles is so much more important than using any specific tool, process, or framework.
Hear more about the guiding principles of continuous discovery from Teresa and Hope in these conversations:
- Why There’s No Single “Right” Way to Do Discovery, Part 1
- Why There’s No Single “Right” Way to Do Discovery, Part 2
- Why There’s No Single “Right” Way to Do Discovery, Part 3
Part 6: Make it Work for YOU (and YOUR Stakeholders)
The final step in the SPICEY framework is to make it work for YOU (and YOUR stakeholders). Your continuous discovery journey will not always be easy, but it shouldn’t feel like a constant battle. You need to find an approach that works for you and gets your stakeholders bought in (at least a little bit) in order to make this a sustainable way of working.
In her Product at Heart keynote, “Even You Can Do Continuous Discovery: Bringing the Discovery Habits to Any Organization,” Teresa introduced what she calls the golden rule of organizational change: We have to meet people where they are.
Instead of trying to win opinion battles and convince people we are right, we need to find steps we can take with minimal friction.
Here’s how Teresa explains it:
If we work in a feature factory, we’re not going to start by defining some outcomes. Nobody in our organization cares about outcomes. We’re not going to start by demanding to talk to customers. We’re definitely not going to say, “Let’s stop delivery to focus on discovery.” We’re definitely not going to argue about the right way of doing things. What we’re going to do instead is we’re going to revisit that golden rule of organizational change. We’re going to meet people where they are. And we’re going to start with the one habit that every single person on the planet can do. To do this habit, you don’t need permission from a single person. You don’t need access to customers. You only need about 20 to 30 minutes. You don’t need to work in a product trio, although it’s a lot better with a product trio, and most importantly, every single one of you can literally do it today. Ready?
We’re going to start by identifying our hidden assumptions. This is literally something every single person in this room can do.
And when it comes to your stakeholders, look for ways you can meet them where they are. This might include things like showing your work so they understand how you’ve come to a specific decision or understanding what matters to them and making sure you focus on those outcomes.
Here are a few more specific examples of how product people have learned (the hard way) how to make discovery work for them and their stakeholders.
Now It’s Your Turn!
Consider some of the tips and tactics we’ve shared here. Do you feel inspired by any of the guiding principles or any specific stories we’ve shared?
Think about what it would take to follow the SPICEY framework, even just for the next quarter. What would be your first steps? Who do you think could be an ally or supporter? What are some roadblocks you might face and how could you overcome them?
Remember: Experiencing setbacks and challenges is just a part of the process. We hope that knowing that from the outset will make it a little easier for you to get started.
And let us know how it goes—we’d love to hear about your journey of adopting the habits!
