To get to an informed conviction through Product Discovery, product teams often need to be creative. It can be challenging for Product Discovery collaborators to make real progress, especially when they lack an environment that provides the right amount of guidance without being too constraining for Adaptable Product Discovery. That’s why today’s newsletter is about three levels of decision-making for targeted Product Discovery and how you can utilize them.
First: Strategic Relevancy Most teams start with a broad overview of a user, customer, or stakeholder’s journey. They are trying to understand the entire workflow someone goes through to complete their most important task. But the chances are that this is just too broad a focus. The first criterion to consider when informing your Discovery activities is the relevance of a given workflow portion to your strategic goals. And by that, I mean the Impact-level metrics that make the most important strategic priority of a company or department measurable. Do you care most about automating more activities of your sales force? Then, focus your efforts on understanding where the most manual work of sales reps is happening. Are you trying to increase monetization? Then focus on the aspects of free, trialing, paying, and churned users’ journey that led them to upgrade, cancel, or become curious about. Second: Lever of user segment toward the strategic goal While strategic relevancy helps you avoid talking to "everyone" and paying attention to "everything," you need more data points to decide whose problems matter. That’s where the lever of a given user segment comes into play. Slicing user segments shouldn’t be based solely on a made-up marketing persona. After all, what does "Tim, 35, Product Manager, loves coffee" tell you about the relevancy of this user’s problems? That’s where quantifying user segments comes into play. Sticking with our example of trying to drive monetization, you don’t want to consider the problems of ALL free users. Instead, focus on the segment with the lowest paid membership saturation and a mid-to-high share of absolute members. Alternatively, you should prioritize the segment with the lowest return rate and share of total members to drive a strategic activation or engagement goal. Just because a user (segment) has a problem doesn’t mean that you have to prioritize solving it. Instead, weigh the lever of the segment against what you’re trying to achieve, Third: Severity of problems Lastly, you must also make decisions about which identified user problem to pursue first. That’s where the severity of issues has to be considered. That includes challenging a statement like "we hear that people need XYZ" by asking for the actual numbers. It’s easy to fall for pursuing whatever opportunity is called out the loudest by someone else if you cannot own the research that this claim is based on. So, create clarity. How many users have articulated this problem? One? Two? More than five? For qualitative research, you want to spot visible patterns amongst properly recruited users. For quantitative measures, seek a pattern from, i.e., support messages received from the relevant target audience for your strategic goal. After all, the severity of the problems should inform your next steps in terms of which ideas you want to test first. To objectify this decision-making, you need a shared understanding to judge how significant the lever of an idea and the problem it aims to solve are. Tools like Reforge's Insight Analytics should make it easier to find patterns across quantitative data sources. The intention behind this triangulation is to help you make decisions that are not just based on self-conviction and anecdotes. Be aware of your responsibility to push for reliable, first-hand evidence. That’s the only choice to break free of Alibi Progress in Discovery and start owning Product Discovery.
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PS: I (selfishly) love making coffee gifts to loved ones. When my wife moved into her new office two years ago and needed a coffee machine, I understood the assignment.
Time Flies When You're Having Fun
My conversation with Cassie Campbell on the Product Rising Podcast could have gone on for hours about the practical realities of connecting the dots of Product Strategy, Product OKRs, and Product Discovery. My favorite moment is at 32:07.
I asked 40 product leaders ‘What is Discovery?’ Here’s what they said
For starters, the solution and problem space aren’t mutually exclusive. Of course we want to avoid the bias of a solution at the start but how we solve the problem has an impact on how desirable something is. It’s not enough to say this is a big problem and therefore it’s desirable. If your solution is crap then it won’t be desirable.
Design Methods Research Planning for Facebook Audience Insights
This became a low-urgency but potentially high-impact project because it had a very clear business impact. But we didn't have tons of instrumentation relative to other parts of Facebook, like we didn't have a ton of instrumentation on how people were using things. So we needed to understand how and why people wanted to use this tool before we could kick off a redesign.
💡 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗼𝗻 𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝘀𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲: many companies move into building way too fast. They jump into building something that is completely overengineered or barely works. And, then, they need so many iterations to make it work that they either give up on the feature or lose their customers. We were able to provide the service while learning and keeping our engineers focused on building things that were already validated. Remember: “𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗻𝘀𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝘄𝗮𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗲𝘀𝘁”. Test with experimentation, understand how to de-risk and learn with cheap experiments.
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