Discovery is a team sport

Created for BelTech 2021. Outlines how an empowered product team driven by a tech lead, product person and designer (the product 'trio') can approach not just discovery but end to end product lifecycle management.

Transcript

1. Discovery is a team sport Emma Mulholland @e_mulholland BelTech 2021
2. Emma Mulholland Product Person @e_mulholland
3. What will I cover? • Building the right thing • To be human is to be biased • What is discovery? • The Product Trio • Benefits to whole team participation • How to get everyone involved
4. Build the right thing Build the thing right
5. Building the ‘thing right’ https://www.ntaskmanager.com/blog/newbies-guide-to-scrum-project-management-101/
6. How do you know what’s the ‘right thing’ to build?
7. Product team User (usable) Technology (feasible) Business / Market (viable) To build a successful product
8. Photo credit: Fifth Discipline Fieldbook by Peter Senge We all engage with the world from a unique perspective We each have different: knowledge, expertise and past experiences - we each select different data, attach different meanings, make different assumptions, draw different conclusions To be human is to be biased
9. Designer Product Person Engineer What Why How The Product Trio
10. Alignment Problem discovery Solution framing Shaping Iterative delivery Grow, pivot, or kill The Product Life cycle
11. Or more like... Problem space Solution space Delivery space Shaping
12. End to end product development as a team
13. • Product led / Product & Design pair • Set a strong vision and explain outcomes • Assumptions mapping and validation • User & Market validation • Hypothesis definition and experimentation • Output - Validated and defined problem Alignment Problem discovery Alignment & problem discovery
14. • Design led / heavy support from engineering • Ideation • Testing • Lightweight proof of concepts • Technical spiking • Output - Defined, validated and valuable solution Solution framing Solution Framing
15. • Product led / heavy trio & team involvement • Shape the product into understandable and valuable pieces that can be created in approx 12 weeks (6 sprints) • Output - Roadmap & product backlog Shaping Shaping
16. • Trio led / engineering heavy • Story writing • Agile delivery methods • Instrumentation (please!) • Continued discovery (dual track) • Sprint backlog / Jira! • Continue through opportunity backlog Iterative delivery Iterative Delivery (& continuous discovery)
17. Good teams, bad teams Marty Cagan (foreword to Jeff Patton story mapping)
18. “Good teams are skilled in the many techniques to try out product ideas to determine which ones are truly worth building. Bad teams hold meetings to generate prioritised roadmaps”
19. “Good teams ensure that their engineers have time to try out the discovery prototypes every day so that they can contribute their thoughts on how to make the product better. Bad teams show the prototypes to the engineers during sprint planning so they can estimate.”
20. • Removes biases • Engineers can ask disconfirming questions • Variety of mindsets enriches insights • Shared understanding of the ‘why’ leads to stronger input to the ‘how’ • Removes risks of knowledge transfer later • Increases motivation and sense of ‘ownership’ within the team • Ensures a smoother delivery Benefits of team e2e product development
21. How to get everyone involved
23. Missionaries not Mercenaries
24. How to get everyone involved • Communicate out a strong product vision • Share discovery insights at sprint review • Create and share out opportunity backlog • Make getting involved easy - e.g. slack channels with info on user testing sessions • Bring team in at key points to update and get input • Build up a strong discovery practice
25. Takeaways?
26. • Follows the collective owned product theory • Creates better insights and solutions • Aids delivery through shared understanding • Increases the product managers capacity .. to do more discovery! Shared end to end development
27. • Experimentation is explicitly mentioned • Sprint Planning now has three topics - the why, the what, and the how Scrum Guide 2020
28. Thank you :) & ... need help? Emma Mulholland @e_mulholland