1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes.
AI Won't Fix Your Product Discovery
4 Opportunities to Layer AI into Your Product Discovery ActivitiesDear Reader, To use AI to shorten your lead time and reduce uncertainty, consider it a layer to supercharge your existing workflow.
Instead of generating with AI, think about supercharging with AI. Here are four common Product Discovery activities where thoughtful AI integration can dramatically reduce uncertainty without sacrificing quality: #1: Writing Interview QuestionnairesDON’T: Ask an LLM to "write interview questions about our app" and use the output verbatim. You'll end up with generic questions that miss your specific research goals and introduce subtle biases that skew your findings. DO: Feed the LLM with the context and constraints for your interview. Get crystal clear on your business goals and the research intent questions or assumptions you need to find answers to. Share what existing insights emerged from quantitative data. Use (re-) documented internal better practices for interviews and offer these as constraints. Add the interview duration and input on prototypes you want to use—if possible, share “what “good looks like” from” other interviews. Then, get to drafting. You'llmazed by the (reduced) amount of correction required. #2: Synthesizing Research InsightsUtilize built-in capabilities of research repositories like Dovetail:
None of these should be done solely by hand. Note how these also stand on the shoulders of your clarity of research goals and method execution quality. #3: PrototypingTools uizard make getting to a first draft easy–given the correct input. Create a prompt for what you want to do, feed it with screenshots of your product or a competitor solution, and have it create an editable and clickable prototype using your brand colors in minutes. While not immediately usable for all user testing out of the box, imagine how powerful the presentation of your ideas becomes if you quickly spin it up and modify it in a meeting to help communicate with domain experts. There are many more opportunities to take this further through Lovable or Cursor, but I haven't ventured into these territories yet. #4: Scaling Discovery KnowledgeCurate your company's commonly agreed-upon best practices for Product Discovery and feed these into a CustomGPT (or equivalent). Then, teach teams how to prompt it to scale “Discovery Coaches” and overcome” the bottlenecks of centralized departments. These can still come in for hands-on contextual support beyond the LLM materials. Garbe-in-Garbage-OutBeware that this is (for now) often a situation in which the quality of your inputs determines the quality of your outputs. You can talk to hundreds of random people, but if you only ask how they like your product, the AI will only surface these lip service-like insights.
Your unfair advantage remains your domain expertise. Use AI to scale processes, but rely on your critical thinking to set direction and prioritize what matters in your context. Did you enjoy the newsletter? Please forward it. It only takes two clicks. Creating this one took two hours. Thank you for Practicing Product, Tim
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. |
Product Practice Newsletter
1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes.
Product Practice #360 Why your Product DiscoveryFeels too Theoretical READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Apr 25, 2025 READING TIME 4 min & 17 sec Dear Reader, Over the past two weeks, I've explored treating Product Strategy and OKRs like products to avoid Alibi Progress. Today, let's tackle the practice that often gets dismissed as "good in theory, impossible in practice" — Product Discovery. When teams tell me "we don't have time for proper Discovery," they're usually stuck in Alibi Progress —...
Product Practice #359 Make OKRs Drive Decisions,not Spreadsheets READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Apr 18, 2025 READING TIME 5 min & 32 sec Dear Reader, Last week, we explored how treating Product Strategy like a product helps you avoid "Alibi Progress" — prioritizing correctness over value. Today, let's apply this same thinking to OKRs. If you've ever found yourself more relieved that the quarterly OKR-setting theater is over than excited about the OKRs themselves, you've experienced the symptoms...
Product Practice #358 Why your Users don't careabout your Product Strategy READ ON HERBIG.CO PUBLISHED Apr 11, 2025 READING TIME 3 min & 24 sec Dear Reader, One of the most powerful ways to spot and stop Alibi Progress is to start treating our practices like products. This means clearly defining three elements: Audience: For whom is this practice meant? Problem: What core problem does this practice aim to solve? Success: How would we know this practice has delivered value? The question then...