What did we learn during this sprint that surprised us? How could we have learned that sooner?
INTRODUCTION
This book is both a framework - and a movement - on how to enable teams to create real value for customers through their products & businesses.
Definitely required reading for founders and team members alike.
FUTURENATIVE - THINK BETTER. BUILD BETTER.
I very occasionally send out an email recapping some thoughts, learnings and ideas typically centred around a thesis & approach I call being “FUTURENATIVE”.
In short, the thesis states: FUTURENATIVE individuals and organization find a unique way to leverage apparent tensions and blend both discovery & execution work, in order to unlock massive impact.
You can sign up here to learn more:
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- I'll refer to the work that you do to decide what to build as discovery, and the work that you do to build and ship a product as delivery.
- Over the past 30 years with the rise of the Internet, our industry has seen a rapid evolution in how we do both discovery and delivery. As a result, we see tremendous variation in our practice. […] For many years, traditional discovery was not done by the product team. In the early days of software, business leaders owned discovery--they decided what to build.
- Many teams chase frameworks, tools, and methodologies, hoping that each new innovation will suddenly unlock the door to product success. However, for most frameworks, tools, and methodologies to be successful, it's not just your tactics that need to change but also your mindset.
- There are six mindsets that must be cultivated to successfully adopt the habits outlined in this book.
- Outcome-oriented:the mindset requires that you start thinking in outcomes rather than outputs. That means rather than defining your success by the code that you ship (your output), you define success as the value that code creates for your customers and for your business, (the outcomes)
- Customer-centric: The second mindset places the customer at the center of our world.
- Collaborative: The third mindset requires that you embrace the cross-functional nature of digital product work and reject the siloed model, where we hand off deliverables through stage gates.
- Visual: The fourth mindset encourages us to step beyond the comfort of spoken and written language and to tap into our immense power as spatial thinkers.
- Experimental: The fifth mindset encourages you to don your but, to do discovery well, we need scientific-thinking hat. Many of us may not have scientific training, we need to learn to think like scientists identifying assumptions and gathering evidence.
- Continuous: And finally, these habits will help you evolve from a project mindset to a continuous mindset. Rather than thinking about discovery as something that we do at the beginning of a project, you will learn to infuse discovery continuously throughout your development process.
Managers must convert society's needs into opportunities for profitable business. - Peter Druker
If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions. - Albert Einstein
- As our product-discovery methods evolve, we are shifting from an output mindset to an outcome mindset. Rather than obsessing about features (outputs), we are shifting our focus to the impact those features have on both our customers and our business (outcomes).
- We are doing research so that we can serve our customers in a way that creates value for our business. Finding the best path to your desired outcome is what researchers call an "ill-structured problem"-also commonly called a wicked problem." […] Much of the work when tackling an ill-structured problem is framing problem itself. How we frame a problem has a big impact on how we might solve it.
- Opportunity Solution Trees are a simple way of visually representing the paths you might take to reach a desired outcome.
- The key here is that the team is filtering the opportunity space by considering only the opportunities that have the potential to drive the business need.
- We don't always remember to question the framing of the problem. We tend to fall in love with our first solution. We forget to ask, "How else might we solve this problem?"
- Good discovery doesn't prevent us from failing; it simply reduces the chance of failures. Failures will still happen.
- Nigel Cross, Emeritus Professor of Design Studies at the Open University in the United Kingdom, compared the knowledge, skills, and abilities of expert designers to novice designers (across a variety of disciplines) and found that the best designers evolve the problem space and the solution space together.' As they explore potential solutions, they learn more about the problem, and, as they learn more about the problem, new solutions become possible.
- We then need to revise our understanding of the opportunity space before moving on solutions. When we do this, our next set of solutions to new get better. When we skip this step, we are simply guessing again, hoping that we'll strike gold.
- When considering outcomes for specific teams, it helps to distinguish between business outcomes, product outcomes, and traction metrics. A business outcome measures how well the business is progressing. A product outcome measures how well the product is moving the business forward. A traction metric measures usage of a specific feature or workflow in the product. […] Business outcomes, on the other hand, often require coordination across many business functions.
- The key is to use traction metrics only when you are optimizing a solution and not when the intent is to discover new solutions. In those instances, a product outcome is a better fit.
- Avoid These Common Anti-Patterns
- Pursuing too many outcomes at once. Most of us are overly optimistic about what we can achieve in a short period of time.
- Ping-ponging from one outcome to another. Because many businesses have developed fire-fighting cultures--where every customer complaint is treated like a crisis -it's common for product trios to ping -pong from one outcome to the next, quarter to quarter.
- Setting individual outcomes instead of product-trio outcomes. Because product managers, designers, and software engineers typically report up, to their respective departments, it's not uncommon for a product trio to get pulled in three different directions, with each member tasked with a different goal.
- Choosing an output as an outcome. Shifting to an outcome mindset is harder than it looks. We spend most of our time talking about outputs. So, it's not surprising that we tend to confuse the two.
- Focusing on one outcome to the detriment of all else. Like we saw in the Wells Fargo story, focusing on one metric at the cost of all else can quickly derail a team and company. In addition to your primary outcome, a team needs to monitor health metrics to ensure they aren’t causing detrimental effects elsewhere.
- the trio's shared map was stronger because they synthesized the unique perspectives on the team into a richer experience map than any of them could have individually created. As you work together to co-create a shared experience map, focus on synthesizing your work together rather than choosing the "best" drawing to move forward with.
- Start by turning each of your individual maps into a collection of nodes and links. A node is a distinct moment in time, an action, or an event, while links are what connect nodes together.
- Create a new map that includes all of your individual nodes. Arrange the nodes from comprehensive map. a new, all of your individual maps into a new, comprehensive map.
- Collapse similar nodes together. Many of your individual map will include overlapping nodes. Feel free to collapse similar nodes together.
- Determine the links between each node. Use arrows to show the flow through the nodes. Don't just map out the happy path
- Add context. Once you have a map that represents the nodes and links of your customer's journey, add context to each step. What are they thinking, feeling, and doing at each step of the journey?
- The purpose of customer interviewing is not to ask your customers what you should build. Instead, the purpose of an interview is to discover and explore opportunities. Remember, opportunities are customer needs, pain points, and desires.
- If you want to build a successful product, you need to understand your customers' actual behavior - their reality - not the story they tell themselves.
- An opportunity represents a need, a pain point, or a desire that was expressed during the interview. Be sure to represent opportunities as needs and not solutions. If the participant requests a specific feature or solution, ask about why they need that, and capture the opportunity (rather than the solution). Opportunities don't need to be exact quotes, but you should frame them using your customer's words. This will help ensure that you are capturing the opportunity from your customer's perspective and not from your company's perspective. Over time, insights often turn into opportunities.
- Interviewing helps us explore an ever-evolving opportunity space. Customer needs change. New products disrupt markets. Competitors change the landscape. As our products and serving, never done, and the opportunity space is evolve, new needs, pain points, and desires arise. A digital product is never done, and the opportunity space is never finite or complete.
- But our job is not to address every customer opportunity. Our job is to address customer opportunities that drive our desired outcome. This is how we create value for our business while creating value for our customers. Rather than jumping to the first need that we might address, Dewey argues, good thinking requires that we explore our options--that we carry out a systematic search for longer than we feel comfortable. We should compare and contrast the impact of addressing one opportunity against the impact of addressing another opportunity.
- One of the biggest challenges with opportunity mapping is that it looks deceptively simple. However, it does require quite a bit of critical thinking. You'll want to examine each opportunity to ensure it is properly framed, that you know what it means, and that it has the potential to drive your desired outcome.
- A solution-first mindset is good at producing output, but it rarely produces outcomes. Instead, our customers care about solving their needs, pain points, and desires, Product strategy happens in the opportunity space. Strategy emerges from the decisions we make about which outcomes to pursue, customers to serve, and opportunities to address. Sadly, the vast majority of product teams rush past these decisions and jump straight to prioritizing features.
"Creative teams know that quantity is the best predictor of quality." - Leigh Thompson, Making the Team
You'll never stumble upon the unexpected if you stick only to the familiar." - Ed Catmull
- We hear about a customer problem or need, and our brain immediately jumps to a solution. It's human nature. We are good at closing the loop-we hear about a problem, and our brain wants to solve it. However, creativity research tells us that our first idea is rarely our best idea. Researchers measure creativity using three primary criteria: fluency (the number of ideas we generate), flexibility (how diverse the ideas are), and originality (how novel an idea is).
- Incubation occurs when your brain continues to consider a problem even after you've stopped consciously thinking about it.
- Confirmation bias means we are more likely to seek out confirming evidence than we are to seek out disconfirming evidence. We pay attention to and remember the data that supports our perspective and often ignore or forget the data that undermines our perspective. The escalation of commitment is a bias in which the more we invest in an idea, the more committed we become to that idea.
- Types of Assumptions
- Desirability assumptions: Does anyone want it? Will our customers get value from it? As we create solutions, we get assume that our customers will want to use our solution, that they will be willing to do the things that we need them to do, and that they'll trust us to provide those solutions.
- Viability assumptions: Should we build it? There are many ideas that will work for our customers but won't work for our business. If we want to continue to serve customers over time, we need to make sure that our solutions are viable-that they create a return for our business.
- Feasibility assumptions: Can we build it? We primarily think about feasibility as technical feasibility. Is it technically possible? Feasibility assumptions, however, can also include, "What's feasible for our business?"
- Usability assumptions: Is it usable? Can customers find what they need? Will they understand how to use it or what they need to do? Are they able to do what we need them to do? Is it accessible?
- Ethical assumptions: Is there any potential harm in building this idea? This is an area that is grossly underdeveloped for many product trios.
- Pre-mortems, on the other hand, happen at the start of the project and are designed to suss out what could go wrong in the future. Pre-mortems are a great way to generate assumptions. They leverage prospective hindsight a technique where you imagine what might happen in the future. A pre-mortem encourages you to ask, "Imagine it's six months in the future; your product or initiative launched, and it was a complete failure. What went wrong?"
- In my experience, most teams have a bias toward one category or another. They are great at testing usability but forget about desirability. Or they always remember desirability and usability, but they forget viability.
- Assumptions Mapping , an exercise designed by David Bland, author of Testing Business Ideas, is a great way to quickly identify what Bland calls your "leap of faith" assumptions-the assumptions that carry the most risk and thus need to be tested.
"Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again.” - Karl Popper
"Your delusions, no matter how convincing, will wither under the harsh light of data." - Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz, Lean Analytics
- Instead of trying to plan everything upfront, start small, and experiment your way to the best instrumentation.
- The reality is this process is a messy, winding path with lots of twists and turns. Most of the work in discovery is not following the process-it's managing the cycles.
- The fruit of discovery work is often decide not to build something.
- When you frame the conversation in the solution space, you are framing the conversation to be about your opinion about what to build versus your stakeholders' opinion about what to build. This is why we have the dreaded HiPPO acronym (the Highest Paid Person's Opinions) and the saying "The HiPPO always wins." When we present our conclusions, we aren't sharing the journey we took to reach those conclusions. Instead, we are inviting our stakeholders to an opinion battle--a battle we have no chance of winning.
- Share more context about your target opportunity. Help them fully understand the customer need or pain point you intend to address. Use your interview snapshots to help your stakeholders empathize with your customers. Answer their questions. This step is critical. Your stakeholder needs to fully understand the opportunity you are pursuing before you share solutions with them. When we show our work, we are inviting our stakeholders to co-create with us.
- "What did we learn during this sprint that surprised us?" "How could we have learned that sooner?"
FUTURENATIVE - THINK BETTER. BUILD BETTER.
I very occasionally send out an email recapping some thoughts, learnings and ideas typically centred around a thesis & approach I call being “FUTURENATIVE”.
In short, the thesis states: FUTURENATIVE individuals and organization find a unique way to leverage apparent tensions and blend both discovery & execution work, in order to unlock massive impact.
You can sign up here to learn more:
