» Too often, ‘building’ becomes the default state for a product team, at the expense of other valuable ways of working
» An product team should not be so rigid that it cannot cope with the occasional mandate from above
» To keep forward momentum, frame discovery around decision making, not just insight
» Product people fight for the users, our teams and the business’s overall health
» Implementing AI means assessing user needs and your data sources
» AI technologies run the risk of creating harm — how are you planning for that?
» LLMs and genAI open up new vectors for novel attacks that need to be countered
» Have a bias to test, learn, and to put code in production
» Feed what you learn from exploring solutions back into your understanding of the problem
» Help stakeholders visualise their ideas to make them easier to challenge, assess risk and test out
» There are 3 reasons why a discovery should end:
1. It is purely performative
2. Ignored / unknown context
3. Unconnected to value
» Everything on your product roadmap should have lots of context that is easy to find
» We can and should measure discovery activity and its impact on the team and users
» Discovery cycle time and cadence are critical to adopting a continuous mindset
» Avoid vanity quantity metrics such as number of research activities; measure quality instead
» Asking about a specific problem causes people to ignore the other problems they have
» Make time for product discovery in small steps, not all at once
» Biases reduce cognitive load for our brain when it processes new information
» An opportunity solution tree is a way to externalize your thinking
How can product management fit into an agency business model? Spoiler alert: _not easily_
» Focus your prototyping on the moments that matter most to users
» Prototypes range in fidelity, but remain throwaway
» Prototyping brings tangibility to intangible experiences
» Be clear about what you want to learn, and what assumptions you want to test
» Design simply to deliver early and learn quickly
» Discovery is about understanding the problem space experienced by people
» When on a tight budget for discovery, mitigate bias where possible and document all the biases you see
» A relaxed participant will open up and be more honest with you
» A discovery can prompt one or more possible solutions, or tell you the problem is not worth pursuing
