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 #428 Linked Better Practices over Stacked Best Practices PUBLISHED Oct 5, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, Sorry for the slip in sending this one out on Friday. To make up for it, there will be (for the first time ever) two newsletters going out this week. Recently, a CPO told me about an engineer who had used AI to develop a proposal. But when the decisions in it were questioned, the engineer kept referring him back to the output. The CPO wondered how that conversation...
Product Practice #427 Your Strategy names one audience; weak evidence describes another PUBLISHED Sep 24, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, One of the most common questions that came up in my recent Strategy to Execution workshop at the ProductLab conference revolved around intentional strategic audiences vs. reactive chasing of new business. Many teams either operate where the company focuses on all customers of a given market (i.e., "all lawyers") or throw a wishful-thinking segment out...
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...