The Problem with 0-1 Metrics

​Dear Reader,​

​Scaling Product Discovery requires more than just having teams talk to more users. In fact, just having teams interview more users without structure and some baseline education might do more harm than good. Here’s what I took away from training over 30 product trios at The StepStone Group:

#1 Educate Cross-functional, wherever possible

It doesn’t make sense to expect Discovery collaboration between Product, UX, and Engineering but only train Product Managers. You want to avoid having the PMs be proxies for the skills you want the entire team to adopt. Having all three core competencies in the training meant that they could understand and challenge each other much better.

#2 Balance Adapting High-level Guidance with Tailored Practical Applications

​Sarah Reeves and the Product Ops team experimented with many ways to get people the information they needed. First, they tried a high-level Mural to illustrate potential processes, which felt too theoretical and left people wanting more details. This led to a more in-depth playbook, which covered much ground but was too detailed.

So, the team returned to more high-level guidance in the form of the original Mural and a lighter version of the playbook. They incorporated feedback from each approach to strike the right balance between the vision, high-level reasoning, and practical knowledge that people need to incorporate learnings into their daily lives.

Their prior experience balancing guidance with practical application led us to agree to complement the training with a series of coaching sessions for those teams. In these sessions, I helped the product trios apply the appropriate discovery techniques to their context.
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#3 Treat the Adoption of Product Discovery like a Product

Most product teams apply the principles of starting small, measuring progress and iterating accordingly to shipping solutions. One of Sarah’s biggest takeaways was to extend these principles beyond the product and use them to shape the way teams work.

“Do an MVP for certain areas to find and prove value quickly,” she recommends. That will give you “evidence to show the benefit of working this way.”

In practice, that means Defining a clear MVP for how you want to change things, testing it with a small group of the organization, and measuring progress to prove the value of your initiative. This will make it easier to scale upskilling efforts that have worked.

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Thank you for Practicing Product,

​Tim​

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Who is Tim Herbig?

As a Product Management Coach, I guide Product Teams to measure the real progress of their evidence-informed decisions.

I focus on better practices to connect the dots of Product Strategy, Product OKRs, and Product Discovery.