1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes. Explore my new book on realprogressbook.com
When are you done with Product Discovery?
When are you done
|
Dear Reader,
One of the standard questions I get in discovery coaching and workshops is, "How do I know I have done enough discovery?" I typically smile, because I can get on one of my favorite soapboxes:
Think of the end of discovery as the exit of a highway you feel confident enough in taking, based on your surroundings and your current understanding of how close you are to your destination, without having a GPS.
Ravi Mehta calls this state informed conviction. But, "unfortunately," there's no formula for reaching it. No amount of scoring or sticking to a fixed number of user interviews before making a decision will unlock this state. Your path to informed conviction is subjective and contextual, varying depending on the product life cycle and other factors. As Teresa Torres reminds product teams around the world through her continuous discovery approach, you're never one insight away from success.
As you gather evidence and move toward informed conviction, you'll reach points where the path forward becomes clear. At these moments, three types of decisions typically emerge:
Keep Moving. When evidence suggests you're on the right track but haven't reached informed conviction yet, keep following your current direction while gathering more evidence along the way. Maybe your problem validation shows promise but needs more specific user segments, or your solution tests indicate potential but need stronger evidence of commitment.
Drop and Pivot. When evidence clearly shows that a problem isn't worth solving or a solution isn't worth building, this isn't failure – it's Discovery working as intended.
Each "no" helps you focus resources on more promising paths. Ant Murphy encourages this as a litmus test for Product Discovery: “How many ideas have you discarded and decided NOT to do?“
Commit to Building. When evidence from both problem and solution spaces align, you've validated a worthy problem and found a solution with strong evidence of desirability, feasibility, and viability. This doesn't mean perfect certainty - it means enough confidence to move forward. And while there’s a rightful amount of criticism about feature factories and an exaggerated focus on Product Delivery, remember this: The most perfectly researched problem and holistically tested idea neither help your users nor your business if they are never executed in high quality and sufficient time.
These aren't one-time, permanent decisions. As you learn more through building and shipping, new evidence might lead to new paths worth exploring. That's the essence of Adaptable Discovery: using evidence to continuously reduce uncertainty about which problems are worth solving and which solutions are worth building.
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
Join my In-Person Workshops in Berlin
I'm excited to bring my beloved in-person workshops back to Berlin in January 2026. You can choose between 1-day workshops on Product Strategy, Product OKRs, or Product Discovery, or opt for the full 3-day experience for you or your team.
| LEARN MORE |
(reach out for custom team quotes)
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. Explore my new book on realprogressbook.com
Product Practice #419 Decision Journaling YourWay to Product Sense PUBLISHED Jul 31, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, I know, I know. You probably can't hear the term product sense anymore (welcome to the club). But I recently arrived at a non-thought-leader-y practical angle for cultivating it. "Product Sense is the ability to usually make correct product decisions, both macro & micro, even in the face of major ambiguity"- Shreyas Doshi In a recent client workshop, the topic of product...
Product Practice #418 The Essence of Every Mapping Technique PUBLISHED Jul 24, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Ways we can work together 1️⃣ Order my book: Real Progress: How to Connect the Dots of Product Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery, which readers call "a practical guide you can return to again and again." 2️⃣ Join my Workshop From Staring at KPIs to Prioritizing with OKRs, in 6 Hours, for turning generic dashboard metrics into useful goals, helping you prioritize and measure your work. 3️⃣ Join...
Product Practice #417 User Outcomes are Positively Flipped User Problems PUBLISHED Jul 17, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, Last week, I mapped how OKRs connect to the layers of an Opportunity Solution Tree. But especially the Outcome layer deserves its own issue: turning a customer problem into a team-level Key Result. I first wrote about it in 2023, before I had a name for it. Since then, the positivity flip has become one of the most-used tools in my OKR and Discovery workshops, so...