Welcome to the first of our Product Book Club series. By popular request, The Product Refinery have started hosting free book clubs for product folks to read a book then get together to discuss how to implement what they learned from it.

For this session, we had a group of 11 product folks from a wide range of backgrounds. Thanks so much to all who attended and contributed, it was a really rewarding session. We got a ton of practical tips out of it and are looking forward to sharing them in this article. Let’s start with a quick summary of the book itself before moving on to look at the tips we shared in the session.

The book: Continuous Discovery Habits

The first book we covered in the club was ‘Continuous Discovery Habits’ by Teresa Torres. If you’ve not read the book, yet, you can get a copy here and here’s a quick summary.

As the name suggests, the book is about making discovery continuous, and a habit, as opposed to just a one-off activity before launching a product, or even worse, not doing any discovery at all.

There are two key concepts that bind the book together:

1. Shifting from an output to outcome mindset.
2. Framing, refining and prioritizing the opportunity space (as opposed to simply talking about customer problems)

The author takes us on a journey to discover how applying these concepts can help you spot opportunities, define what to test in those opportunity spaces, get stakeholders on board, generate buy-in for your ideas, and ultimately build a product that customers love, and which aligns with the goals of the business.

She introduces the following ‘6 mindsets for continuous discovery’ along with tips and tactics to support each and encourage the adoption of them as habits.

• Outcome-oriented. Focusing on outcome rather than output.
• Customer-centric. Really understanding your customers.
• Collaborative. Getting the right people involved in discovery.
• Visual. Using the opportunity solution tree, among other tools to map-out what you want to learn in discovery.
• Experimental. Making the process hypothesis-driven and learning all the time.
• Continuous. Making discovery an ongoing part of business-as-usual rather than a one-off activity.

The most notable framework she shares in the book is the ‘opportunity solution tree’ which many people find is a really simple way to organise your thinking during the discovery process.

The book is a well-loved favourite of product designers around the world but it’s not an exhaustive guide to discovery and people often need a little help implementing what’s in it, which is why we chose it as the first book to cover in our Product Book Club.

What we learned

1. Visualising opportunities and solutions is REALLY useful

‘Visual’ is one of the six mindsets mentioned in Continuous Discovery Habits, and for good reason. Our group found that the visual format of the opportunity solution tree had a number of benefits:

• It made it easier for stakeholders to understand and get bought into the discovery process when they could see product activities related to business goals. The visual layout of the tree also made it easier to open conversations with stakeholders who had a set opinion on what a solution looked like or thought they ‘knew it all’ about the customers.
• It made onboarding new people to product teams easier – they could understand what was going on faster.
• The opportunity solution tree helped people be more thorough in discovery. It provided a mental model that encouraged them to explore more options rather than just pressing ahead with what might have seemed ‘obvious’.

Tip from the group: One of the group members found it more effective to have an opportunity solution tree per business outcome so that each product lead could have a tree for their focus area.

2. You need to put systems in place to make discovery continuous

Putting the ‘continuous’ in ‘Continuous discovery habits’ was a challenge for most of the members of the group, however, there were some great tips shared in the session:

• Automate user recruitment for research. If you have people booked in, it forces you to engage with them on an ongoing basis, making your discovery continuous. If you have a regular pipeline of users to speak to, your product team can prioritise the issues they want to talk to them about and who gets to join the conversation.
• Set up regular meetings to revisit your opportunity solution tree. The frequency depends on whether this is with stakeholders or the core product team, some participants found they were going back to it twice or more each week with their teams. Set up regular meetings to do this with stakeholders and your team. If it’s booked in the diary, you will do it.

Tip from the group: With B2C products you can embed user recruitment mechanisms into the product, with B2B, you can get other functions such as client success to help.

3. Make your research easy to find, and to understand

All this discovery work will result in a lot of information which can be useful to other product managers down the line. One of the group members mentioned being able to solve a challenge they were working on purely based on user research that was already in their system – a clear benefit of being well organised.

• The ‘Picture and quote’ format makes it easy to discover user research that might be useful.
• Keeping canvasses or artefacts that were created as part of the research process helps people make sense of the research.
• Full recordings and transcripts are invaluable for understanding the nuance of what customers are saying. And often different researchers will hear different information in there.

Tip from the group: Dedicated tools such as https://condens.io/ can make it really easy to manage research, but as long as you are well organised, keeping it on your internal wiki, such as Confluence, can work too.

4. Get the right people involved

The people mentioned in the session were:

• Developers and designers. It makes sense to get your core team involved but if you can’t all conduct interviews, ensure people are able to include their key questions and have access to the transcript or recording.
• Analysts. Make the most of the folks you have available to you. If you have analysts that can help, they might be able to bring valuable research skills to the discovery process.
• Marketing (particularly growth marketing). Marketers will find being involved in discovery helps massively and you’ll find it’s a great way to help get them aligned with what you are doing in product.

Tip from the group: Also consider when people are not involved in discovery. For example, if you have highly-opinionated senior stakeholders, their bias might skew your research so it might be better to conduct some work without them to encourage a more diverse selection of ideas and opinions.

5. Language matters – be clear on what opportunities are

There’s a lot in the book about the difference between customer problems and opportunities, and while the language works for product people, sometimes it can cause people to jump to solutions (eg. “We have a great opportunity to build x”).

The visual layout of the opportunity solution tree goes some way to mitigate this but it’s also important to be clear everyone understands the language you’re using, especially in workshops or when people are working independently on discovery. Having a worked example of one opportunity that everyone will understands is a good way to do this.

Things people will do differently

At the end of the book club, we each committed to do one thing differently in our discovery process. Everyone came up with something a little different but generally they were variations on one of these five things:

• Set a cadence and automate user recruitment
• Make user interview info more useful and discoverable
• Be more explicit in mapping and using the OST format
• Share what I’ve learned with the wider product team
• Just have a go at OSTs and get used to using them

In summary

As a group, we got a lot from Continuous Discovery Habits. In fact, the book is so rich in tips and tricks that many of us missed parts in our initial read-through of the book which were great to be reminded of in the Product Book Club session.

I, personally, would put this on a list of must-read books for product managers. It adds so much value whether you are looking for hands-on tips to improve your own user research skills or thinking about how to implement more effective discovery processes with your team.

If you’d like to be part of our Product Book Club, sign up to our newsletter for updates on the dates and books for the next sessions.

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