Transformed

CHAPTER 17Product Discovery

Product teams are responsible for both figuring out the best solution to the problems they've been asked to solve, and then building and delivering those solutions.

The former is product discovery, and the latter is product delivery.

Principle: Minimize Waste

The first principle in product discovery is to try to solve the problem with a minimum amount of wasted time and effort. This is why product discovery is the key to accelerated time to money.

The product team could certainly just take their best guess at a solution, describe that solution to the engineers, and then have them build and deliver that solution.

This is essentially what has been done for decades by so many companies in the IT model.

But we also have decades of data clearly showing that the majority of solutions built that way (generally 70 to 90 percent) end up not delivering the necessary business results.

This is wasteful not only from a direct cost perspective (especially because the largest cost is usually the engineers), but also from an opportunity cost perspective.

Every once in a while, the team gets to take a second shot, but even then, the odds are against success with that way of working.

The concept of product discovery emerged because smart companies saw the waste in working this way. They wanted to ensure that they had sufficient evidence to believe that the solution they asked their engineers to build would successfully solve the customer or business problem it was ...