Discover the right products

How do you know that you are making a product or service that your customers want?

It’s not only about delivering things right, but also about discovering the right things to deliver. You can't have one without the other.

Discovery is continuous. At a minimum, weekly touchpoints with customers by the team building the product where they conduct small research activities in pursuit of a desired outcome.

Customers don't always know what they want, and what customers ask for isn't always what they need. Don't ask them what you should build. 

Ask them to share specific stories about their experiences. Avoid direct and factual questions because we struggle to answer them accurately.

The purpose is to discover and explore opportunities, i.e., what needs, pain points and desires matter most to this customer? 

The Opportunity Solution Tree (OST) is a framework for continuous discovery and a simple way to visually represent the paths we may take to reach a desired business outcome.

The opportunity space represent customer needs, pain points and desires that, if addressed, will the drive business outcome. 

The solution space represent solutions addressing the opportunities, and rather than testing solutions we test assumptions that need to be true for our solution to succeed.

A visualization and a tree structure helps building a shared understanding, it helps you break large opportunities into a series of smaller ones, you avoid "whether or not" decisions, it makes it easier to summarize your work to stakeholders, and it makes it easier to prioritize.

Product strategies happens in the opportunity space. Prioritize opportunities, and not solutions.

To test assumptions you need to generate assumptions. You can imagine that the solution already exists and then map out each step users must take to get value from it. This forces you to be specific and it forces you to make desirability, viability, feasibility and usability assumptions.

You can't test every assumption. You need to prioritize and to prioritize you need to identify the riskiest ones. How much do we know about this assumption, and how important is this assumption to the success of the solution?

When testing an assumption, be specific with your evaluation criteria upfront. 

The team must align around what success looks like. Don't throw spaghetti at the wall, hoping something stick. Remember, you are not trying to prove that the assumption is true. You are simply trying to mitigate risk, and stop when you have mitigated enough.

"Continuous Discovery Habits" by Teresa Torres


Sooner, Safer, Happier

I am glad to announce that I have started a transformation, and here's how I will do it.

I treat this as just another temporary project with a big, up-front planning and design that I turn into outputs pushed to my people for implementation within clear deadlines. 

I have decided to roll out a new tool, initiate a mandatory mass-training, and impose a brand new methodology that everyone shall follow.

No. Let's stop here. This is all antipatterns in "Sooner, Safer, Happier - Antipatterns and patterns for business agility" by Jonathan Smart.

Organizations are complex adaptive systems. We need to evolve our ways of working to deliver value in a way that suits the nature of the work (Cynefin framework). 

In the Age of Digital, don't use methods from two technological revolutions ago on unique, knowledge-based work that is emergent and full of unknown-unknowns.

Start with the "Why"

Start with why if the why is not already clearly understood, and communicate it three more times than you think you need. You cannot over-communicate the why.

What happens if the status quo is maintained? What’s the “so what”? Why do people need to go through the discomfort of change and lack of mastery? What appeals to the selfish gene? 

There should be a compelling why unique to your context and organization, which is the call to action. “We want to be more agile”, “We want to be more lean”, “We want to be more product-oriented” are insufficient calls to action.

A useful exercise is doing a “five whys”. Break into pairs with the starting question of “Why change?” and take turns asking why five times with each answer forming the basis of the next question.

Desired outcomes

Next, articulate and agree on your desired outcomes. Agile, DevOps, Lean and Design Thinking are the means to an end, they are not the end. They are bodies of knowledge, wisdom, principles, and practices to be applied in context to achieve desired outcomes.

Outcomes should be measured and visualized. Focus on the trend over time and relative ranking on improvement rather than on absolutes, as everyone has a different starting point. The goal is to improve over time.

Business outcomes are hypotheses and they are nested with a lineage up to longer-term, organization-wide strategic outcome hypotheses. Outcomes are not passed down, unchanged, in a traditional order-giver, order-taker manner. Instead they align. They are written and “owned” by the people at each level in the nested value streams.

Leaders go first

The leadership team is number one. If a leadership team is not willing to role model desired behaviors, why shall other teams do it?

People in senior roles have a disproportionate impact on behavioral norms. Trust and role modeling are essential.

Ways of Working Center of Enablement

In order to be successful, there is a need for people who are dedicated full time in a servant leader capacity to orchestrate the improvement of the system of work across an organization. 

For a large organization, the success patterns is to have federated Ways of Working Centers of Enablement, with one for each business unit or value stream and a central one providing the team-of-teams coordination.

The Center of Enablement deal with impediments to achieve the outcomes that bubble up, with a goal of solving them at the lowest possible level. They are not a department of improvement where improvement actions are lobbed over the fence.

There should be an impediment backlog, with the Center of Enablement orchestrating the right people in the organization to help alleviate the top-priority impediments where this is beyond the sphere of influence of a team.

This is leadership in ways of working, being coaches, guiding people on the journey, sharing learning internally and externally, communicating, creating community, rewarding and recognizing desired behavior and outcomes.

Achieve big through small. 

Achieve big through small instead of big through big. Minimize time to learning. 

Change is hardest at the beginning. There is no one size fits all. Context matters. Every environment is unique. Starting small makes it safe to learn, keeps change within risk appetite, and generates social proof unique to your context.

People have a limited velocity to unlearn and relearn. You cannot force pace of change. If you do, you will only get new labels on existing behavior. Start small and within the risk appetite. 

Amplify the experiments that work well, and quickly dampen the ones that don’t. Experiments are then amplified or dampened.

Let the natural champions go first

Allow people to satisfy their psychological need for agency and control, the need to feel in control of one’s own destiny. Allow the Innovators, the natural champions, to identify themselves. They are motivated by the buzz of being first, and have probably been working this way formally or informally for some time. 

Invite participation and get behind the champions. Give the champions the coaching and the support they need in order to deliver business outcomes. As the benefits are seen, recognized and communicate via every mechanism available, the early adopters will want to join in. They can see that it’s safe to put a toe in the water. Gradually invite them in too, within the pace of unlearning and relearning and within risk appetite.

Invite everyone from top to bottom

Invite everyone from top to bottom (a vertical slice), don't leave the pressurized middle behind. They have to deliver, come what may, and are now being asked to change ways of working as well as continuing to deliver. It’s a difficult role and is often missed during a change that is sponsored from the top table and implemented at grass roots. 

Everyone learns together, and no one is left behind. It's not easy, as the most enthusiastic group of people is at the team level. 

Communicate, communicate and communicate

Communicate three more times than you think you need. Use every communication channel at your disposal and add some more.

Use the channels to reinforce the why, the values and principles, the outcomes, to recognize desired behavior and to do story-telling. Have senior leaders recognize the great work of teams in improving outcomes and have teams share their stories.

Stick at it

It requires commitment and resilience. It takes years for sustainable, lasting culture change, for genuine agility. 

For a large organization with a tailwind, it’s three to five years, longer with headwind. There are no shortcuts. 

In organizations with traditional ways of working, change is staccato. In evolutionary biology terms it is "Punctuated Equilibrium" rather than "Punctuated Gradualism". There are long periods of stasis, then a burst of disruptive change. There is lack of ongoing continuous improvement.

Become the best at being better.