Product Discovery Triangulation

​Dear Reader,​

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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​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.
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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.
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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.
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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,
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​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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Thank you for Practicing Product,

​Tim​

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.

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Content I found Practical This Week

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.