Continuous discovery is not a linear journey—as much as we might want it to be. Like a lot of learning, it often feels messy and chaotic.

Continuous discovery is not a linear journey—as much as we might want it to be. Like a lot of learning, it often feels messy and chaotic. – Tweet This

But if you stick with it, you may eventually find you can look back and see how much you’ve progressed.

That’s certainly the case for Kelsey Terry, who’s sharing her story in today’s Product in Practice. In her former role as Director of Product at Going (formerly known as Scott’s Cheap Flights), Kelsey was tasked with running a pilot product trio. The idea was that her trio would test out the concepts from Continuous Discovery Habits and then guide the broader product organization at Going to adopt the habits.

Did Kelsey’s trio instantly absorb continuous discovery and then seamlessly roll it out to everyone else at her company? This would be a much shorter blog post if that were the case!

In fact, Kelsey and her team faced many challenges along the way. They didn’t have enough time and felt rushed. They had too much time and struggled to make progress. They weren’t sure how to show their work and bring their stakeholders along with them.

But Kelsey kept iterating. She kept looking at what was working and what wasn’t until eventually she found a path forward.

We hope Kelsey’s story will remind you that your continuous discovery journey is likely to experience some twists and turns along the way, but it’s still worth sticking with it through those tough spots.

Do you have a Product in Practice story you’d like to share? You can submit yours here.

Meet the Continuous Discovery Champion, Kelsey Terry, Former Director of Product at Going

Meet the continuous discovery champion, Kelsey Terry, former Director of Product at Going.

Kelsey Terry is the former Director of Product at Going, a B2C SaaS company that helps members save between 40–90% off airfare. The product team at Going includes product management, product design, and a flight experts team. Kelsey oversaw three product squads and reported to the VP of Product, David Krell.

Kelsey’s career began in QA and she’s spent the past ten years working in product. “I really just love focusing on keeping the customer at the forefront of building great, impactful solutions,” says Kelsey.

When Kelsey first joined Going, there wasn’t a clearly defined process in place for talking to customers. “We would have organic conversations about bringing products and features online and we would talk to people when we needed to,” explains Kelsey.

Kelsey’s Introduction to Continuous Discovery

In her time at Going, Kelsey says that their approach to building the roadmap was radically different each year. When Kelsey first joined over three years ago, they were looking at customer trends in the inbox from the customer success team to identify opportunity areas and cross-referencing these ideas with their executive team. “I’d say our roadmap was informed by customer requests married with executive desires in terms of what they thought were great ideas and what they thought would move those metrics forward in terms of retention or our desired growth rate at the time,” she explains.

Kelsey was involved in the process of hiring VP of Product David Krell, and during his interview he talked about how Continuous Discovery Habits had helped highlight ideas for how to keep customers at the forefront of product work.

When David ended up joining Going, he made Continuous Discovery Habits required reading for the product team. “That essentially became a roadmap for how we were going to do product with him as our leader,” says Kelsey.

And Kelsey saw a lot of potential with continuous discovery as well: “Continuous Discovery Habits was the answer to the question of how to keep customers at the forefront of building great, impactful solutions,” she says.

Continuous Discovery Habits was the answer to the question of how to keep customers at the forefront of building great, impactful solutions. – Tweet This

The First Attempt at Continuous Discovery: A Tight Deadline Serves as a Circuit Breaker

Once David joined Going, his goal was to prototype continuous discovery with one team, and that was the team that Kelsey ended up leading.

They looked for an opportunity to apply the concepts from Continuous Discovery Habits and found a use case that had some built-in constraints: One of their subscription tiers, Elite, had its anniversary coming up. Because it was an anniversary for a subscription product, the team knew their outcome would be to reduce churn. And the anniversary itself was coming up fast—they only had about 20 business days.

They also had a steady stream of customer feedback that would get tagged and piped into Slack, so they could specifically look at why customers were contacting customer success about Elite memberships and which themes were recurring.

The team already had a solution in mind, which was to come up with more customer-friendly options than simply canceling, which could include things like having customers pause, ride out their time, or switch plans.

From this feedback, Kelsey’s team quickly zeroed in on a potential solution. They story mapped their customer flow at the time and identified some of the off-ramps they could create for customers that would better serve them if they needed to pause their membership, cancel it, or ride out the benefit until their renewal date.

The product trio also went through assumption mapping for the first time. Kelsey explains, “I asked, ‘What has to be true at every step of this process in order for us to stick the landing?’”

To go through assumption mapping, I asked, ‘What has to be true at every step of this process in order for us to stick the landing?’ – Tweet This

They went through this process in the shared sandbox of FigJam and everyone was encouraged to point out any potential issues they observed. An engineer could call out an assumption they didn’t believe was true or a designer could question whether the choices they were making (e.g. the placement of text or the use of dialogues) were optimal. Kelsey explains, “The way I try to frame assumptions is: We are betting on a lot of things to be right. And how do we visualize that thinking in that shared sandbox so that we can help eradicate our individual blind spots?”

Kelsey believes this was a critical moment for product trio collaboration: “It was a process of bringing all those people together to generate assumptions and then ultimately shape the solution,” Kelsey explains.

The solution they came up with was related to the account management page, where customers have the ability to see their plan type, how much their subscription costs, when they’ll next be charged, and where they have the ability to upgrade their subscription or adjust their email settings.

The concept was a “manage my account” button. If a customer clicked on it, they would see a dialogue with questions like “Would you like to pause your subscription?” “Would you like to keep the benefit until your subscription runs out?” or “Would you like to cancel your subscription right now?” Kelsey explains, “The thinking was if we improved the account management page, it would be less of a surprise for customers when their plan is renewing.”

Next, their tech lead created some lo-fi mockups in FigJam. Kelsey says these were simple wireframes with boxes and sketches. Team members would physically draw ideas at their own desks and then upload them to FigJam so they could riff off of each other. After running through a few iterations this way, they got into mid-fidelity, which is when it made sense to have UX build out some real UIs.

At this stage, they did a “design spot check,” which involved pulling in customer success and marketing partners to get their feedback. They might weigh in on things like whether the copy was confusing or if there were areas where customers were likely to get tripped up. “In this stage, we could refine it while the paint was still wet,” Kelsey explains.

Once the spot checks were complete, they locked in the design, had the designer make their hi-fi version, and asked the engineers to start figuring out how to pull it off.

They were able to make the changes they’d planned and they got the feature out on time. While they weren’t able to prevent all churn, they were able to establish a baseline. They now had a benchmark for both the Elite product and the Premium product, which was something they didn’t have before.

While Kelsey’s team wasn’t able to adopt all of the discovery habits in this first round, they still managed to accomplish a lot—they were able to leverage customer feedback to find a compelling opportunity, story map solutions, iterate on designs by talking through their assumptions, and test prototypes with customers. And most importantly, they did it as a collaborative team. It’s especially impressive that they accomplished all this in only 20 days.

The Second Attempt at Continuous Discovery: Lack of Strict Time Limit Leads to Perfectionism

For the second attempt at continuous discovery, Kelsey’s team no longer had such tight time constraints. Their primary goal was to do everything “right.” If you’ve been reading Product Talk or following Teresa for a while, you might recognize this as a potential problem. And you’d be spot on, as you’ll see shortly.

Having an open-ended timeframe proved to be both an advantage and a disadvantage, according to Kelsey: “We spent a lot of time rereading and highlighting and referring to specific sections of Continuous Discovery Habits. It was very meticulous.”

Because they were the pilot team, there was also pressure to get everything “right” because they would be expected to teach others how to adopt continuous discovery. “It felt very exhausting because we would challenge one another’s beliefs about how we would interpret the book, but none of us were experts.”

In this round, the outcome was focused on increasing web engagement. Research from the data team had shown that people who engage with more of Going’s content and deals online were more likely to be retained. “We wanted to increase engagement of web content via guide consumption, opening up our travel deals, possibly hitting that booking icon. And so we wanted to basically layer on value within the product experience on the web,” explains Kelsey.

For this iteration, they began talking to customers to learn more about how people travel. Through these conversations, they began to identify that many people lack flexibility with their travel while the Going product really demands flexibility. “Deals happen at any time and sometimes you have to book them very fast. But people with children, with school schedules, teachers, they are beholden by budget, calendar, airline preference, or seating preference.”

Based on what they were hearing from customers about flexibility, they began to build out their opportunity solution tree. The team worked with Product Talk instructor Hope Gurion to frame the opportunity as: “I value a particular criteria for my flights when I travel. I have some rigidity.”

Then they had child opportunities listed underneath that opportunity associated with different criteria, like “I want to see all the legendary deals,” “I want to see all weekend based deals,” and “I have Delta status, so I just need to see Delta deals.”

Based on what they were seeing from the customer success Slack integration and what they were hearing in customer interviews, Kelsey’s trio discussed and voted on which opportunities they wanted to pursue.

They ended up narrowing in on “I value a particular criteria for my flights.” The child opportunity within that was “I have limitations around when I can travel.” Keeping that customer quote at the forefront, they wanted to ensure that they built something for specific dates.

Next, they started building out multiple solutions, story mapping different ways they could solve that opportunity. “We ultimately landed on the creation of something called Save Filters. You can set your preferences of Delta under $500 in the month of June and then name that container of filters and we would always be looking for that on the website,” explains Kelsey.

One of their primary concerns with this solution, however, was whether or not they could match customers’ expectations for how it might work. Kelsey explains, “There was this concern that while we were building filters for our website, where you could set the attributes, there was a technical limitation at the time where we were not going to filter the emails we sent you.”

Kelsey’s team wanted to understand if a customer set up a filter on the website, if they would also expect that filter to apply to the alerts they received by email. They used customer interviews and prototype testing to understand this risk. They showed a lo-fi mockup of the product to customers and asked questions to learn how they were interpreting it or what they might expect from certain features.

“This took a very long time,” says Kelsey, describing the second iteration of continuous discovery, which ran for about two and a half months. They were meeting Monday through Thursday as a trio for 60 to 90 minutes each time. They’d come up with their own solutions on their own, share them with the team, and debate.

Going back to the theme of perfectionism, Kelsey says, “There was a lot of debate because I think there was that fear of wanting to get the foundation right. We were the prototype team. And if we’re going to be training other people, we have to get this right. So I think that caused this desire for perfection versus progress.”

Summing up this second round, Kelsey says, “Because we were novices to the process, I think we over-engineered what we needed to do.”

A Brief Pause to Make Adjustments

After the second attempt at continuous discovery, it was clear that something needed to change. There was a lot of pressure and perfectionism, which was frustrating and prevented the team from moving forward at a reasonable pace.

They ran a retro to take a closer look at their process. They wanted to identify what was working and what wasn’t.

At this stage, they created some circuit breakers for each step of the process and started timeboxing different activities. They decided they wanted to go through the process every 20 days.

The team felt an immediate sense of relief. “This created some comfort and encouragement. I felt like this was not going to be like an ultra marathon for the rest of my life,” says Kelsey.

But looking back, Kelsey sees some limitations to this approach. “I think a shortcoming of our perspective back then was that we viewed the process in very much a cardinal order. You must hit every box versus a toolbox where you can pick up a hammer or a screwdriver at the right time.”

I think a shortcoming of our perspective early in continuous discovery was thinking you must hit every box vs. a toolbox where you can pick up a hammer or a screwdriver at the right time. – Tweet This

The Third Attempt at Continuous Discovery

With the goal of focusing on faster iterations, Kelsey’s team was ready to tackle their next outcome.

For this round, they focused on onboarding. Their outcome was to increase the number of customers who got through the onboarding process into the product. When they started this cycle, their onboarding process was 20+ steps. They saw drop-off at every step. So naturally, they thought if they could reduce the number of steps, they could increase the number of customers who completed the process.

The team wanted to be bold in their approach. They story mapped the existing onboarding process and worked to cut everything that wasn’t essential. They whittled it down to a 3-step onboarding process, while sticking to their new 20-day time limit. They were excited about the results.

But when they presented their proposed solution to their executive team, they were surprised when the executives weren’t as excited. The executives deemed the solution too risky. Kelsey says, “We were very off track in terms of what we produced, and as a result we were frustrated and discouraged that we’d put in all this effort and thought, and it was off base.”

Once again, Kelsey felt the need to take a step back and reevaluate.

Applying Continuous Discovery to the Organizational Change of Using Continuous Discovery Habits

At this stage, Kelsey’s team ran another retro with the goal of figuring out how they could make continuous discovery work for the business.

Kelsey started by talking with her “customers”—her executives, members of the product trio, and members of the product team who hadn’t participated in the product trio—to learn what they saw as the shortcomings of continuous discovery.

From these interviews, Kelsey identified three key themes: continuous discovery felt too slow, too exclusive, and very unclear. “It was very hard for people to follow along because this is a highly visual process, and not everyone is versed in visual tools like FigJam, double diamond frameworks, assumption maps, or storyboards,” says Kelsey. She saw her challenge as coming up with a new solution that was true to the spirit of Continuous Discovery Habits but more accessible for her coworkers.

Kelsey mapped out the opportunity space and designed rituals and artifacts that would help her team better show their work throughout discovery. “One of the core things that our executives wanted was insight,” says Kelsey. “They didn’t just want to be handed a FigJam link. We needed to make it more business friendly, so we created a series of meetings and artifacts to support them.”

One of the core things that our executives wanted with discovery was insight. They didn’t just want to be handed a FigJam link. We needed to make it more business friendly. – Tweet This

They came up with a regular cadence for their work:

• Monday: The product trio meets to discuss their current opportunity and whether they have any assumption tests to define or results to review
• Tuesday: The product trio meets with the broader team to refine solutions, which reduces feelings of exclusivity
• Wednesday: The product trio reviews progress on their outcome, opportunities, and solutions they’re looking to de-risk with key executive stakeholders
• Thursday: The engineers demo whatever they’re working on, both in terms of discovery and delivery, sharing work early and often to gather feedback from their peers

Establishing a regular cadence had a forcing function: Both the product trio and engineering teams felt they had to make progress every week since they’d be on the spot at the next weekly meeting. “There’s the internal forcing mechanism of the trio meeting on Monday as well as the larger organizational accountability for progress every Wednesday,” says Kelsey.

These rituals helped Kelsey’s team drive faster discovery cycles, while keeping key stakeholders up to date on their findings. It wasn’t easy, but Kelsey’s team was finally able to find a cadence and process that worked for everyone.

Key Learnings and Takeaways

As she looks back on this experience, Kelsey has a few key learnings and takeaways for other teams.

First, Kelsey says she’d avoid using the label of “continuous discovery.” Here’s her reasoning: “PMs can sometimes get a bad reputation for wanting to adopt the latest new framework.” Instead of using any specific label, Kelsey recommends just introducing the concepts to your team. “Say something like, ‘Hey, this is a way I think we could talk about what we’re seeing with our customers.’”

Another key lesson: Give yourself a lot of grace. Kelsey’s story illustrates that perfectionism can prevent your team from moving forward if you’re not careful. Try not to be too hard on yourself or your team to get everything “right” and treat this as a learning experience.

“If continuous discovery doesn’t work for your org, it doesn’t work at all,” cautions Kelsey. What does this mean for you? “You have to modify it. You have to take the principles of Continuous Discovery Habits and apply them to the business that you find yourself in. You have to understand your business and then apply the spirit of discovery to your business in a way that makes sense.”

If continuous discovery doesn’t work for your org, it doesn’t work at all. – Tweet This

Finally, be aware that not shipping is also a risk that you need to be aware of. “My VP, David always says that by not giving value to our customers, one, it’s a risk to the business that someone else is inching up against us, and two, if we’re just spinning our wheels and we’re just postulating all day long, we’re not even serving our customers. And we are hired to support the business and our customers.”

Kelsey first shared this story in the Continuous Discovery Habits Slack community. If you’re looking for a safe space where you can connect with like-minded product peers and share your own learnings and questions, come join us there!

The post Product in Practice: Adopting the Discovery Habits is An Iterative Process appeared first on Product Talk.

Product in Practice: Adopting the Discovery Habits is An Iterative Process was first posted on February 28, 2024 at 6:00 am.
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You don’t necessarily need anyone’s permission to get started with continuous discovery. In fact, some steps—like story mapping and identifying your assumptions—don’t even require anyone else to participate. You can easily go through these activities on your own.

But at the same time, continuous discovery shouldn’t always be a solo activity. There’s a reason why Teresa often refers to the product trio: Continuous discovery is more effective when you avoid turf wars and bring in different perspectives.

Continuous discovery is more effective when you avoid turf wars and bring in different perspectives. – Tweet This

And while you technically don’t need permission to get started, at some point, you will need buy-in and support from your leadership. When leaders see the value in continuous discovery, they can help you define your outcome and carve out space for discovery activities. They’ll place more trust in you to pursue the opportunities and solutions you believe will have the most impact on your desired outcome.

So how do you walk that fine line between experimenting with continuous discovery and keeping your leaders informed and supportive? That’s the question we’ll explore in today’s Product in Practice. We spoke with User Research Director Niklas Fischerström and Chief Product Officer Francesca Cortesi to learn how they’ve worked together to roll out continuous discovery habits at Hemnet.

Do you have a Product in Practice you’d like to share? You can submit your story here.

Meet the Continuous Discovery Champions, Niklas and Francesca

If you’re from Sweden, you’re likely already familiar with Hemnet. But for everyone else out there, Hemnet is Sweden’s largest property portal and one of the top five most popular apps in the country.

Niklas Fischerström is the User Research Director at Hemnet. “My job is to make sure that our product teams have the tools (both software and know-how) and the processes that they need to deliver great products,” says Niklas. He divides his time between working within a specific product team that needs extra support and taking on more of an umbrella function alongside the UX Director outside of the product teams.

Francesca Cortesi has been the Chief Product Officer at Hemnet since 2019. “I have a mission of creating an organization that can execute on Hemnet’s vision and mission by creating value for all our customers in a way that supports business growth,” says Francesca.

Hemnet’s product teams are created around customer groups (consumers, sellers, real estate agents) and they also have supporting teams on a tech level (payments, platform, client platform). The product organization at Hemnet consists of ten people. In addition to Francesca, there are six product managers, one strategic partnership manager, one user research director (Niklas, who we’ve just met), and one UX director. “Both of the director roles have been really important in supporting our journey towards continuous discovery,” says Francesca.

Meet the product team at Hemnet. From left, Product Manager Noa Åbyhammar Julin, Product Manager Henrik Agardh, Product Manager Hampus Meisner, Product Manager Michelle Rea, Product Manager Madeleine Ardby, UX Director Dan Kindeborg, CPO Francesca Cortesi, Strategic Partnership Manager, Aurora Ruuskanen, and User Research Director Niklas Fischerström. Not pictured here is Product Manager Kristoffer Jalve.

Taking the First Steps with Continuous Discovery

In the beginning of 2020, Niklas and a developer were discussing their frustration with working on solutions that they didn’t really believe fit their stated outcomes. While they had started working with OKRs a few years earlier, they felt there was a disconnect between their key results and the actual work they were doing. “We kept asking, ‘Why are we working on idea X instead of idea Y?’” says Niklas. “We felt like we were missing a good framework to connect solutions to our goals or outcomes.”

One of the ways Hemnet encourages learning is through an article club—like a book club, but focused on sharing and discussing articles, YouTube talks, and podcasts—and Niklas’s developer colleague had shared a talk by Teresa on the opportunity solution tree.

“After seeing it, we felt immediately that it could help us visualize the problem we had with connecting research with development,” says Niklas. “So we started from there. We took our key result we already had decided upon in our OKRs and built a tree from there. As a researcher, I already had a bunch of opportunities ready and the team then could help out with solutions. That’s how it started, and the first win was how we as a team could better motivate why we prioritized some solutions over others. Shortly thereafter we created a product trio and we were on our way.”

After seeing the opportunity solution tree, we felt immediately that it could help us visualize the problem we had with connecting research with development. – Tweet This

One of the first steps Niklas took was to build an opportunity solution tree based on the key result that was defined by their OKRs.

Why did Francesca feel comfortable allowing Niklas’s team to take these steps? She explains that as a leader, she’s always thinking in terms of risks. “That’s the first thing I think about whenever someone comes to me with an idea. If it’s not a big risk, you should always try it.” In this case, it felt like there was minimal risk because Niklas’s team was already talking with users and it was not the most prioritized area of the product at the time. “Even if we had completely failed, we would have only failed on that team; not in the entire company,” says Francesca.

Risk is the first thing I think about whenever someone comes to me with an idea. If it’s not a big risk, you should always try it. – Tweet This

At the same time, she considered what the product team had to gain. “A really important component is, ‘What do we think we’re going to gain in working this way?’” And the way Francesca saw it, continuous discovery itself had the potential to help get at better solutions faster: “Product discovery is a way to scale up the way you test ideas and mitigate the risk of building directly.”

The Next Phase: Scaling Continuous Discovery

After Niklas’s team began speaking with customers and using opportunity solution trees, they started to share what they were doing with other product teams at Hemnet, who were also excited to start doing continuous discovery.

But it wasn’t as simple as just rolling out the habits to every team. Francesca explains that while many people were interested, “It wasn’t necessarily their background to talk with users or do product discovery or to identify their assumptions and a user’s actual pain, not what they assumed was their pain.” This required support and education.

Identifying assumptions was a skill that took time to build at Hemnet since it was a new way of thinking for many members of the product team.

For example, product teams that didn’t have as much experience with continuous discovery needed to learn how to put their assumptions in their opportunity solution tree, how to schedule interviews, and how to rotate tasks so that everyone would get the chance to ask questions and take notes.

Providing support in the form of templates like this customer interview template made it easier for people who were new to discovery to take their first steps.

Francesca says having those with more experience help others was the key to their success: “In my experience, you can read a book, but you cannot expect people to go from book to reality with no support.” Plus, as a leader she knew it was important to give those teams the space and the support they needed to figure out how to make continuous discovery work for them.

In my experience, you can read a book, but you cannot expect people to go from book to reality with no support. – Tweet This

Aurora Ruuskanen, strategic partnership manager (standing), and Yichu Chung, UX, going through one of Hemnet’s partner’s user journeys in order to identify opportunities to work with.

From Niklas’s perspective, there were three things that accelerated continuous discovery at Hemnet:

1. The first continuous discovery product team showed good results and got buy-in from their CPO (Francesca) to continue to spread this way of working.
2. COVID struck and people quickly got used to remote meetings, which turbo-charged the amount of interviews they could do.
3. Teresa released her book, which they made mandatory reading for all their UXers. (Niklas also notes that at Hemnet, UXers are expected to be researchers as well as designers, so it’s their job to drive the discovery work in the trio. It’s also up to them how much of the theory they want to use. Different teams started to experiment with methods from the book based on their own needs without Niklas or anybody else requesting them to).

So why did Francesca feel confident enough to give Niklas the green light to continue scaling continuous discovery? She says there were a few factors: Based on their initial discovery work, it was clear that they could iterate much faster, they were able to answer questions much faster, and they were forging much more effective cross-disciplinary relationships. “Having three or four different roles working together from the beginning actually creates something really strong,” says Francesca.

Key Learnings and Takeaways

Niklas shares a few observations of his continuous discovery journey so far. “First of all, I think the product trio is a genius concept and it really helps with both speed and clarity, which is great from a product manager’s perspective.” Niklas adds that the product managers at Hemnet believe product development is a team sport, so it has been a smooth transition to start trios in every team.

Niklas is also impressed by what’s possible with the opportunity solution tree: “The opportunity solution tree is a great visualization of both goals, insights, and possible solutions that is on its face super easy to explain.” He says that building an opportunity solution tree based on what they know today could easily persuade product managers to see the benefit of something that shows the whole picture instead of tickets in Jira or Trello. “We still use those tools for our developers during delivery, but they are not great at showing why we are building something.”

The opportunity solution tree is a great visualization of both goals, insights, and possible solutions that is on its face super easy to explain. – Tweet This

Another great learning according to Niklas was that they really started being “continuous” in their discovery work when they made it a routine to talk to users every other week. They started by branding it “Feedback Thursday,” and all UXers blocked meetings on the same day in their calendar. “We helped out with recruiting and taking notes on each other’s research. This was a great springboard to always talk to users and after a short while all teams were up and running with interviews and assumption tests every week,” says Niklas.

Creating a regular calendar event for “Feedback Thursday” was an effective way to promote continuous discovery.

Finally, Niklas adds that theory and practice are different, so you can’t always work “by the book” and follow a framework to the letter. “No framework will solve all your problems,” says Niklas. “For instance, I love the opportunity solution tree, but sometimes we’ve had long stretches where delivery has been on the forefront and we haven’t touched the OST. All of our teams work slightly differently with continuous discovery, but the overall process is there as our backbone. Since we share terminology and the general discovery process, we can easily share learnings and eventual improvements between the teams, which is beneficial for all.”

For other product leaders out there who are considering rolling out continuous discovery, Francesca says, “One of the biggest learnings for me in scaling continuous discovery to the entire organization is that it is wise to not do it at once. It was good to have one team starting so we built some trust in the process, and that other teams were inspired by it. This made it much easier to get buy-in from the rest of the organization.”

One of the biggest learnings for me in scaling continuous discovery to the entire organization is that it is wise to not do it at once. – Tweet This

And if you’re an individual contributor wondering how you can get your leaders bought in, Francesca shares the following advice: “In my experience, when you get a no, it’s because the risk feels like it’s too big. Either it’s completely off what the organization wants to achieve, or it’s deemed too risky or expensive, or it is something completely new and not proven yet.”

To increase your chances of getting a yes, Francesca says, “Try to take the very smallest step that you can. And even in that step, you can timebox it and really define what success is and what’s in it for your leader.” Try to clearly state what your organization will be gaining if the experiment works. “Many times when I talk to product managers or teams, they really see the value, but they’re not able to pitch what they’re going to bring to their organization. Make sure you always think about what’s in it for them; not only for you, and make it explicit.”

Are you looking for a community of like-minded peers where you can share your challenges and discover useful resources? Come join us in the Continuous Discovery Habits community!

The post Product in Practice: All It Took Was One Product Trio to Inspire Change—The Hemnet Story appeared first on Product Talk.

Product in Practice: All It Took Was One Product Trio to Inspire Change—The Hemnet Story was first posted on September 13, 2023 at 6:00 am.
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Many teams, like sales and marketing, have time-bound goals, like reaching $X in bookings or generating Y leads by a specific date.

Product teams are also held to time-bound goals. Empowered product teams, for example, are asked to deliver outcomes each quarter.

But sometimes companies take this too far. They ask product teams to deliver specific features by specific dates. This is like asking a sales rep to close a specific deal on a specific date. Or asking a marketing team to get a set number of leads from a specific campaign.

Asking product teams to deliver specific features by specific dates is like asking a sales rep to close a specific deal on a specific date or a marketing team to get a set number of leads from a specific campaign. – Tweet This

Our work is unpredictable. Sales reps can commit to quotas, but they can’t always tell you what sale will close when. Marketing teams commit to driving a certain number of qualified leads, but they can’t always tell you which campaigns will work and which won’t.

The same is true for product teams. Estimates are unreliable, problems grow in scope, and we don’t know what will work until we test it. This doesn’t mean we can’t commit to outcomes. We do. But it does mean we shouldn’t commit to specific features by specific dates.

This can create tension between product teams and your company leadership or stakeholders—some argue that they can’t coordinate work with the rest of the company without these dates.

This was a question that came up in the CDH community and I know it’s something a lot of product teams struggle with.

Question: How do you respond to requests for date-based roadmaps?

To provide a bit more context, one CDH community member was being drawn into theoretical debates about date-based roadmaps. They were encountering arguments like, “No one else in the org can set goals without date commitments, so product needs to be held to the same standard.” They turned to the CDH community to see how others have engaged in similar conversations and whether they’ve found a happy compromise.

Here’s my take on it.

The Problems with Date-Based Roadmaps

Date-based roadmaps appear to create certainty, but they set unrealistic expectations and destroy trust when you can’t uphold them.

First, I’d like to address some of the shortcomings of date-based roadmaps. Most teams don’t usually end up releasing features on the dates indicated on their roadmaps. While roadmaps appear to create certainty—you’re showing what will happen when—they actually create chaos. They set unrealistic expectations and destroy trust when you can’t uphold them.

While roadmaps appear to create certainty—you’re showing what will happen when—they actually create chaos. They set unrealistic expectations and destroy trust when you can’t uphold them. – Tweet This

I’ve written before that date-based “roadmaps are exercises in futility.” The reason I say this is because teams put a lot of time and energy into a document that is immediately out of date and often ignored. For many teams, creating roadmaps is a political game that allows stakeholders to argue over their own interests rather than putting customers or users first.

At best, creating a date-based roadmap is a waste of time. At worst, it sets the wrong expectations and puts the product team in a position of having to always defend their deviations from the plan.

We need to let go of the idea that we can enumerate a list of features that represents what we’ll do in the future. This idea is absurd.

However, I want to clarify that my issue is not with roadmaps altogether. There are some types of roadmaps and some situations when roadmaps allow our stakeholders to know what we are working on now, what we’ll be working on next, and what we may be working on in the future.

This is why I’m a fan of Janna Bastow’s Now Next Later roadmaps—they allow you to communicate this essential information without overcommitting to exactly what you’re going to build when.

In fact, I use the Now Next Later format (although I use the language “Now Next Future”) for my own Product Talk roadmaps. I shared an example a few years ago when I announced my plans for 2021.

A Now Next Later Roadmap like this one allows you to share what’s planned without committing specific solutions to specific dates.

You’ll see that as the roadmap moves further into the future, there’s much more uncertainty, especially when it comes to specific solutions and their timelines. If you’d like to dive more into the context around this roadmap, you can read the full article here.

The Biggest Lesson: Don’t Fight the Ideological War

Now that I’ve gotten my rant about date-based roadmaps out of the way, let’s look at some ways you can actually tackle this problem.

My most important lesson to impart is: Don’t fight the ideological war.

This is a point I emphasized during my Product at Heart keynote. The golden rule of organizational change is to meet people where they are. We don’t accomplish anything when we try to convince people we are right. Instead, we need to find ways of making small changes that they can agree with (more on that in the next section).

We don’t accomplish anything when we try to convince people we are right. Instead, we need to find ways of making small changes that they can agree with. – Tweet This

If your stakeholders are insisting you use date-based roadmaps, I wouldn’t engage in the ideological war about deadlines and predictable work (as the person who asked this question felt they were being drawn to do). Instead, start with a feature-based roadmap. Give your stakeholders what they are asking for, and over time, you can introduce opportunities and outcomes.

Start Small and Iterate

While you are giving your stakeholders what they’re asking for in the form of roadmaps with timelines, you can use the same artifact to start introducing opportunities and outcomes.

While you are giving your stakeholders what they’re asking for in the form of roadmaps with timelines, you can use the same artifact to start introducing opportunities and outcomes. – Tweet This

With a date-based roadmap, you’ll inevitably miss your deadlines. So when you learn that a given solution won’t work, or you need to reduce scope, or you need to ask for more time based on something you learned in discovery, couching the changes in the context of the opportunity and outcome on the roadmap will make it feel less like a miss.

It helps to introduce consistency when solutions need to change. For example, you can say something like, “We had to descope the solution to hit the deadline, but we are still confident it will address the opportunity.”

In my conversation with Ellen Juhlin about introducing continuous discovery at her organization, she shared a great example of taking this approach. What I really love about Ellen’s story is that she looked at where her organization was at to determine where she could introduce different pieces for the people who were receptive.

In her case, she started adding outcomes to her roadmap spreadsheet as a small first step. While leadership was used to dealing with a list of outputs, Ellen started to connect each output to the outcome it would drive, like winning a big customer or increasing engagement. This allowed the product team to introduce outcomes into their priority conversations.

Ellen’s story reminds us not to seek perfection or wholesale change—it’s really about finding the small changes you can make and iterating from there.

Communicate Your Vision and Your Process

Finally, you want to commit to communicating your vision and your process with your stakeholders. Instead of sharing feature lists, we should communicate how we will make decisions.

Everyone needs to know how much progress you have made towards your goal and what else you are doing to get there. These are the conversations we should be having with our teams.

What about your customers? Do they need to know what features are coming when? My answer is: It depends. Most teams err on the side of telling their customers way too much about what is coming and when.

You do need to tell your team and your customers what’s coming next. As in your next release. But you don’t need to tell them what’s coming next quarter or the quarter after that. Most of the time, they won’t care. And the times when they do, if you set wrong expectations, you’ll do far more harm than good.

You do need to tell your team and your customers what’s coming next. As in your next release. But you don’t need to tell them what’s coming next quarter or the quarter after that. Most of the time, they won’t care. – Tweet This

You think about your product all day every day. Both your team and your customers only think about your product to the extent that it helps them get done what they need to get done. Their view of the future when it comes to your product is much shorter than yours. That’s a good thing. Use it to your advantage and stop setting expectations that you can’t keep.

We tackle questions like this one in the Continuous Discovery Habits community every day. If you’re looking for a place where you can discuss your own challenges and successes with like-minded peers, come join us!

The post Ask Teresa: My Leaders Still Want Roadmaps with Timelines—What Should I Do? appeared first on Product Talk.

Ask Teresa: My Leaders Still Want Roadmaps with Timelines—What Should I Do? was first posted on October 4, 2023 at 6:00 am.
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The post Ask Teresa: My Leaders Still Want Roadmaps with Timelines—What Should I Do? appeared first on ProdSens.live.

Reading is one of my favorite ways to spend my time. I’ve designed my business to allow plenty of time for reading books, articles, interviews, etc. 

As much as I love reading, I firmly believe that reading alone is rarely enough to help us change our behavior. Most of us need an extra push to go from ideas and inspiration to action.

As much as I love reading, I firmly believe that reading alone is rarely enough to help us change our behavior. Most of us need an extra push to go from ideas and inspiration to action. – Tweet This 

I was very intentional about including the word “habits” in my book title, Continuous Discovery Habits, because I wanted to emphasize the fact that anyone can make small changes in their behavior to get better at discovery. 

But I didn’t stop there. 

I also created the Continuous Discovery Habits Community as a place where product people could gather (virtually), share their successes and frustrations, and hold each other accountable for putting the ideas from the book into practice. In learning and development circles, this type of community is known as a “Community of Practice.”

Product leadership coach Petra Wille became fascinated with the idea of Communities of Practice because in her experience, they were the differentiating factor between companies that had successful product orgs and those that didn’t. Like any good product person, she decided to conduct both qualitative and quantitative research to dig into this topic, including running a survey and holding in-depth interviews with community leaders and organizers (like me). 

Petra teamed up with Product Talk blog editor Melissa Suzuno to compile all of this research into a new book, Strong Product Communities. 

Introducing a brand-new book, Strong Product Communities, co-written by product leadership coach Petra Wille and Product Talk’s editor Melissa Suzuno.

To celebrate the launch of Strong Product Communities, I’m publishing an excerpt here: Petra’s interview with me about the CDH community. 

I hope this look behind the scenes will inspire you to come join us in the CDH community—and pick up a copy of Petra and Melissa’s book!

Please note: This interview was conducted in 2022. Some of the specifics of how the Continuous Discovery Habits community works have changed, but the broad strokes are still correct.

Overview of the Continuous Discovery Habits Community: What Is It and Who Participates?

Petra Wille: Teresa, what does the term “Community of Practice” mean to you?

Teresa: Creating a space for people to come together, share, learn, and talk about what’s working and what’s not working. It’s a group of people that want to learn around a shared topic. I think it can be that broad.

To me, a community of practice means creating a space for people to come together, share, learn, and talk about what’s working and what’s not working. – Tweet This

Petra: Why did you decide to start your Community of Practice?

Teresa: I had two reasons for starting a Community of Practice: One was scaling impact. If you can get people helping each other, you can help a lot more people than when one person helps people. I’ve started to embrace the fact that we really do learn in community. It’s really rare that someone can read something on their own and just put it into practice. We learn by discussing ideas with each other, by hearing about what other people are doing, and by seeing lots and lots of examples. I wanted to see if there was a way to create a space where people could do that for each other.

We learn by discussing ideas with each other, by hearing about what other people are doing, and by seeing lots and lots of examples. I wanted to create a space where people could do that for each other. – Tweet This

And two, I’m sort of done being the “expert.” That’s not the role I want to play. When I show up as an expert—whatever that means—people don’t interact with me like I’m a person anymore and I don’t really like that. So I want to move towards creating things that facilitate support rather than me giving support.

The CDH Membership is a Community of Practice for anyone who’s trying to be more intentional about continuous discovery.

Petra: Can you give us an overview of the Continuous Discovery Habits (CDH) community: Who participates and where do you “gather”?

Teresa: Product managers, designers, software engineers, user researchers… feel free to add your favorite title. We primarily gather in Slack. We also do two community calls a month on Zoom.

Regular Meetings and Rituals in the CDH Community

Petra: What are the meetings, rituals, or anything you do on a regular basis? 

Teresa: There’s a lot! We do monthly challenges, a book club, community calls, and a new member call. Let me explain each one in a little more detail.

Monthly challenges

The challenges are designed to help people invest in a discovery skill. Sometimes they’re really concrete, like I recorded a real discovery interview with a member, posted it, and asked people to identify opportunities. So sometimes it’s really tangible, concrete, let’s practice a skill together. And sometimes it’s more support oriented.

We’re still trying to figure out what works, what gets people to engage, and what’s helpful, so every month is a wild experiment, but there is a monthly cadence. We anoint a “challenge champion” every month for the most engaged member and they get a free month of membership if they win.

Book club

We used to do a quarterly book club, but we just switched to monthly to increase the likelihood that someone would participate at some point since the book club takes place on a rolling basis. The way that works is we read a book one month while discussing the one we read the previous month. Members basically have a month to read and the subsequent month to apply.

We’re not a typical book club—we don’t have a call and just sit around and discuss what we liked or didn’t like about the book. Instead we design weekly activities to help people apply what they read in the book to their own work. So it’s more of: Read this for inspiration and then we’re going to give you activities to do each week to help you apply them.

Community calls

We do these twice a month. I host the calls, but it’s not a Q&A format. The first half of the call, we do small group discussions, so it’s an opportunity for people to connect with others in the community. I come up with a discussion prompt each month, which is often tied to the book club or the monthly challenge, and we put people into breakout rooms in Zoom and they discuss.

Halfway through the call, they come back into the big group and share some of the highlights from their small group discussions. Then we also solicit topics, challenges, tough situations at work that people just want to talk through. The way we do that is we use the chat channel as a backlog and everybody just puts in their topics. That’s really fun and we get really different people in the calls than those who are the most active in Slack.

New member calls

Every two weeks, I get on a call with everyone who joined in the last two weeks. The purpose of those calls is just to help people get to know a handful of people so when they’re in Slack they already know some of the other members.

Petra: Have you always used the same format or have things changed over time?

Teresa: I have tried LOTS of things that didn’t work. Probably one out of three of our monthly challenges works. We try a ton of things that get no engagement. But I don’t need people to be engaged. I feel like the product world has this sickness with engagement. You have a job to do—you don’t need to hang out in my community all day every day.

My goal is to create really small ways you can chip away at investing in your discovery habits. As you’re inspired and as you have time, you can jump in and participate in something. So maybe that means that we read 12 books a year—I will be shocked if anybody reads all 12. That’s not the intent. The intent is: Maybe one book really resonated with you and it happened to be at a time where you had time to read. Maybe you meet two people that make a difference to your discovery. Or maybe one challenge in a year happened to be really relevant to what you were working on in that moment in time.

My goal is to create really small ways you can chip away at investing in your discovery habits. As you’re inspired and as you have time, you can jump in and participate in something. – Tweet This

Promoting Interest and Participation Within the CDH Community

Petra: How do you promote interest and participation within the community?

Teresa: We created a new member journey and an onboarding process. I make it really clear in our new member calls that when you hear from our community manager, it’s not because she’s trying to convince you to do things. She’s just trying to make you aware of what things exist. We started with her sending a message like, “Hey, it looks like you haven’t come to a community call. You should come to the next one.” And I didn’t really like that—it felt a little too pushy. Am I doing something wrong? Do I not belong here? That’s my reaction to that. So we’ve reframed all the messages to be more like, “Hey, it looks like you haven’t joined one of our community calls. That’s perfectly fine. But I did want to let you know they exist and this is what happens on them.”

We really are trying to frame everything in the community as: Get out of the community what you want. But we are running this awareness campaign. For a lot of people, onboarding is all about engagement, but for us it’s all about awareness.

We basically outlined all the things we’d want a new member to do. They’re things like: introduce yourself, reply to somebody else’s post… Because we’re in Slack and we have no analytics from Slack, we do a bunch of emoji polls. My community manager also does a lot of analytics, making note of when somebody posts for the first time, when somebody reacts for the first time.

The thing we’ve noticed that has the highest impact by far is that people who come to new member calls stick around. People who don’t, don’t. I’m learning that this onboarding experience is really critical and that when people come to the new member call and they meet a few other people, they’re much more likely to stick around.

The other thing I’m recognizing is that Slack is a really good tool for some people and a really terrible tool for other people. So we do have churn because there are people who say, “Oh yeah, I just can’t get Slack to work for my daily life.”

Bringing in External Speakers and Resources

Petra: What’s your approach for bringing in external stimulus?

Teresa: I started by thinking, oh, I know all these product thought leaders. I’ll invite them. In fact, Petra, you were our first one. And people loved that. But here’s the thing: If I want to hear about Petra’s book, there are probably 100 places I can go, because Petra promoted her book. That’s not something that’s unique to the community.

So what I’ve started to focus on is for the community to be a place where I can highlight the work of the community members. So instead of inviting product thought leaders to come speak, I’m going to say, “Look, Chris is one of our community members. Look at the awesome work he’s doing.” And I think that’s actually truer to the community and in a lot of ways it’s more helpful.

I see a lot on Twitter about the fact that “the ideal way to do product management” doesn’t help anybody. There’s a lot of truth to that and a lot of not truth to that. But we’ll focus on the truth. What do people want? They want real-world examples. What does this actually look like in practice? Which is why we do the Product in Practice series on the Product Talk blog. This is what it looks like in practice. That’s the community. That’s what people are getting out of the community.

What do people want? They want real-world examples. What does this actually look like in practice? That’s the CDH community. That’s what people are getting out of the community. – Tweet This

I’ve had to learn that when people ask questions, they don’t always want me to answer. They want to hear the 20 other ways other people are doing it. So we don’t do a lot of external stuff that way anymore. We do share a Worthy Read every day and that’s to stimulate conversation and the same with the book club. I know people read or listen or watch a ton of stuff, but it’s edutainment. They’re not doing anything with it. Our goal with all our external stuff is: How do we get them to actually apply it?

A Few Final Thoughts on Running the CDH Community

Petra: What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of having an external CoP like yours as opposed to one that’s only for employees at one company?

Teresa: I think there’s two parts to this. It’s really important to see how other people work. Organizations develop their way of doing things and it can start to feel really rigid and you lose a lot of innovation, whereas when you get exposed to lots of different ways of doing things, you see that it could be possible in your organization. And more importantly, you see how important it is to find the right fit for your team. There’s not one way to do this, and when you get lots of examples you can see that way that I read about in the blog post isn’t going to work for me, but this other way is similar and can work for me. That’s really important.

And the other part—getting to that Twitter criticism of “everybody writes about the ideal way but nobody ever really works that way”—it’s actually really important for people to see the real messiness of this. And when you’re in a community with a lot of other companies and teams and industries, you get to see some of that mess. And it helps with this feeling of you’re doing it wrong.

When you’re in a community with a lot of other companies and teams and industries, you get to see some of the messiness of their work. And it helps with this feeling of you’re doing it wrong. – Tweet This

Petra: What has surprised you about your CoP?

Teresa: We’re making a pretty big shift right now. We’re co-creating community guidelines and it’s inspired a lot of good conversation about what value people get out of the community, what kind of place they want it to be, where they currently see gaps. And if you go to the sales page for my community, the number one value proposition is it’s a place where you can get questions answered. And that felt like what I wanted to create. It’s a little bit like coaching, having a sounding board, having somebody reflect back your thinking, getting help when you’re stuck.

What has surprised me is that some of our most valuable posts are people just sharing what they’re doing. They don’t have a question, they’re not stuck, they don’t need help. Maybe it’s a success story and they’re just sharing what worked, but sometimes it’s just, “Here’s what’s going on in my world.” And people love it. So now in our new member calls, I’m telling people it’s a place where you can get your questions answered, but it’s also a place where you can share what you’re doing. And you’ll be amazed with how people connect with that.

Petra: What are the things you would like to see your community do more of? Any plans on how to improve it in the coming year?

Teresa: I would like to see people share their daily work more often. That’s been a big insight for us, so we’re looking at how to encourage that more. It could be anything from weekly wins to pictures of a whiteboard.

Our book club last month was about Essentialism, which is all about finding your core work that you do best and spending most of your time there. So the activity we did for week one was to share a picture of their calendar and talk about what meeting they were going to stop going to, how they were going to free up space. And this week they’re going to identify two areas where they most shine. And then next week they’re going to answer how they are going to create space to do more of those things. That’s an example of how we get them to apply the book; not just read and discuss the book, but I also think we’re using it to help people show what they’re doing. Show a screenshot of your calendar—don’t just tell us which meeting you’re going to stop going to. Start to share more of your daily life.

Don’t stop at reading. Commit to taking action in a supportive space where you can share your work and stay accountable to your goals. Come join us in the CDH community! 

The post A Conversation with Petra Wille: My Approach to the Continuous Discovery Habits Community appeared first on Product Talk.

A Conversation with Petra Wille: My Approach to the Continuous Discovery Habits Community was first posted on November 8, 2023 at 6:00 am.
©2022 “Product Talk“. Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please let us know at support@producttalk.org.

The post A Conversation with Petra Wille: My Approach to the Continuous Discovery Habits Community appeared first on ProdSens.live.