Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

Pre read notes

What I want to archive with this book?

A: I want to answer on these questions:

• How do you know that you are making a product or service that your customers want?
• How do you ensure that you are improving it over time?
• How do you guarantee that your team is creating value for your customers in a way that creates value for your business?

What do other people think about this book?

• A book that will take you through the process of doing research-backed product work step-by-step.
• It also has a pattern for practice based books where each chapter ends with a “Common Anti-Patterns” section where it lists the ways you can mess up a particular approach.
• A must-read for all that can’t wait to have continuous product discovery as their standard practice.
• It is a step-by-step guide to product discovery.
• There are many books about discovery techniques as “Sprint”, “Testing Business Ideas”, “The Lean Product Playbook”, “The Mom Test”, etc. But there is any which covers the discovery approach as a whole from an organizational, strategic perspective. “Continuous Discovery Habits” fills this gap.
• In the last chapter Teresa Torres writes that she had the same challenges as every product manager and tells a secret how she overcame those obstacles. After the read, you really believe you can start doing discovery no matter what!
• The book focuses on the question “what to build”, which can be daunting looking at the universe of possible options. Teresa Torres provides practical and concrete methodologies to clarify a problem and structure the opportunity space.

Read notes

Q: How does the author prove that the model works? The author worked for a startup and then quit to do coaching.

“…goal with this book is to share those habits with you in the hopes that you, too, will be inspired to spend more time with your customers.”

Is spending more time with your customers summary from the book?

Chapter one

THE WHAT AND WHY OF CONTINUOUS DISCOVERY

What is continuos discovery? Spend less time but repeat more frequently. Discovery and delivery phase should be shorter. The work that you do to decide what to build as discovery and the work that you do to build and ship a product as delivery. Is it good to have daily releases? Customers should help build a product.

The Evolution of Modern Product Discovery

Go from annual discovery/delivery/verify to weekly/daily.

A product trio

trio(can be >= 2 people) is a set of people that make decisions. The more folks involved in each decision the longer it will take to make a decission.

The Prerequisite Mindset

1. Outcome-oriented. Outcome > output. Example: “That means rather than defining your success by the code that you ship (your output), you define success as the value that code creates for your customers and for your business (the outcomes)?
2. Customer-centric. Focus on creating customer value as well as business value.
3. Collaborative. Make team decisions while leveraging the expertise and knowledge that we each bring to those decisions
4. Visual. Draw to externalize your thinking.
5. Experimental. Identify assumptions and gather evidence.
6. Continuous

Chapter two

A COMMON FRAMEWORK FOR CONTINUOUS DISCOVERY

Begin With the End in Mind

Outcome > output

The challenge of Driving Outcomes

Customer-centric. Do research so that we can serve our customers in a way that creates value for our business. There are no right or wrong answers, only better or worse ones. How we frame a problem has a big impact on how we might solve it.

The Underlying Structure of Discovery

Visualise with Opportunity Solution Tree(OST) https://miro.com/templates/opportunity-solution-tree/. It helps:

• Resolve the tension between business needs and customer needs. The team filtering the opportunity space by considering only the opportunities that have the potential to drive the business needs
• Build and maintain a shared understanding of how they might reach their desired outcome
• Adopt a continuous mindset
• Unlock better decision-making
• Unlock faster learning cycles
• Build confidence in knowing what to do next
• Unlock simpler stakeholder management

Post read notes

Key points:

• Share information between team members
• Collective decisions
• Outcome > output
• Find a collision between client and business needs
• Identify assumptions and gather evidence
• Keep doing in a loop