As part of my discovery for the Product Discovery course I’m working on - yes going very meta here - I decided to ask a bunch of product leaders, how do they define product discovery?

I then expanded that to the 35,000+ followers I have and ended up with 40 different definitions for product discovery.

Of course this shows that if you get 10 product people in a room, the chances of us all agreeing on something is slim to none 😆 but I was genuinely curious on what themes would emerge and if there were any better ways to frame product discovery.

Product Discovery activities by risk. This isn't supposed to be an 'ultimate list' or 'must do' I created it as a guide to help give you an idea of some of the discovery activities that you might do depending on what you need to test.

Below you’ll find a write up on:

• What is Dual Track (continuous discovery and delivery) and how does it work

• Why you should move away from project discovery towards this model

• The mindset that you need to make it successful

• and common practices that I’ve found helpful

In this week's post you’ll find:

• What is product discovery?

• The 3 Core Components of Product Discovery

• What the definition of done is for discovery

• Why product discovery should help you STOP ideas

• And who does product discovery

“Deciding to invest in your Product sense is among the highest ROI decisions you’ll make in your career.” - Shreyas Doshi

I want to do two things in this post:

1) Give you actionable ways to build product sense.

2) Explain what the hell Product Sparring is and how product leaders can use it to build product sense in their teams.

4 of the most common Product Discovery mistakes that I see teams make and actionable steps to avoid them and level up your Product Discovery game!

A common pattern I see in many of the product teams and companies I coach is that they’re doing a lot of incremental work but little-to-no iterations.

They have this big idea (often framed as an initiative) and become solely focused on breaking it down. The initiative becomes a series of epics, and that epic becomes a series of user stories, and so forth.

We’ve all heard the saying, “if you try to please everyone, you please no one.” This is especially true for startups and new products. Focus and being able to find a niche can be a huge unlock for products.

A comprehensive guide to conducting user interviews covering: 1) How to structure a user interview for maximum impact and 2) How to design better questions to elicit high-quality responses.

If we can all agree that the outcome is important, not the output (i.e. a feature) then we shouldn't consider any item of work as 'done' until it's created the desired outcome.

Building products is messy, uncertain, and non-linear. I’ve always found trying to explain this to someone who hasn’t experienced it difficult.

A step-by-step guide (with templates) to level up your Product Discovery. A common question I get when I coach Product Managers is, "I know what I want to do discovery on, but how do I get started?" Although there are many ways to start discovery, I have two tools that are my absolute go-to for kicking off and structuring Product Discovery.

“Defining value: the most ambiguous word in product development” was the title of a post by Jeff Gothelf at the beginning of last year. If there was the battle for the most ambiguous term in product I’d have ‘value’ take second place to ‘MVP’ but as far as single words go, ‘value’ takes the podium.

This is something that comes up often for me — I get questions like:

“What’s the difference between a Product Designer and Product Manager?”….All valid questions but they all have one problem. They are all coming from an individual perspective, not a team one