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
You don’t need to investigate every problem
You don’t need to
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Dear Reader,
Discovery without direction leads to endless exploration. Teams can feel overwhelmed, believing they must investigate every problem.
Your strategic audience choices determine which customer feedback deserves priority investigation, while discovery insights reveal whether your strategic assumptions about customer problems and competitive positioning hold up in practice. This creates a feedback loop where strategy becomes more evidence-based, and research becomes more targeted.
Valuable OKRs turn strategic directions into measurable, actionable priorities for teams. When your goals target specific user behavior changes, discovery can focus on understanding why those behaviors aren't happening as expected.
The goal isn't perfect certainty, but sufficient confidence to make better decisions. Methods should be selected based on what uncertainties most need reduction, not what process looks most thorough. Success isn't measured by perfect adherence to a discovery process, but by the reduction of costly mistakes (i.e., shipping features nobody uses).
Give your next discovery cycle a clear direction.
Join me September 28–30 for From Strategy to Discovery. Three live sessions to make clear strategic choices, set goals you can influence, and plan what to test first.
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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. Explore my new book on realprogressbook.com
Product Practice #425 What Part of YouIs Making the Decision? PUBLISHED Sep 11, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, For much of my career, I’ve helped product teams work through uncertainty. Chilling with my buddy King Arthur at Tintagel Castle I challenged assumptions, introduced frameworks, and helped people make better decisions when there was no obvious answer. While I still love doing that work, I’ve become increasingly interested in a deeper question over the past six years: From where...
Product Practice #424 Linked Better Practices over Stacked Best Practices PUBLISHED Sep 4, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, “Let’s prioritize by value.” Value for whom? That was the question I explored in last week's essay Business Value, Customer Value, and Team Value Are Different Arguments. Today, let's demystify the term value even further. Nothing is inherently valuable. The same opportunity can have different value under different strategies. For that narrative to check out, we need...
Product Practice #423 Business Value, Customer Value, and Team Value Are Different Arguments PUBLISHED Aug 27, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, As long as everyone focused on Value you can't do the wrong work, right? RIGHT? Well, as lovely as that sounds, I believe there's a tremendous amount of misdirected focus on value going on in teams. Let's dive into it. Three questions hide behind "value" in most conversations: Did this move a number the business gets paid on. Did customers change...