Chapter Twelve: Managing the Cycles

Thus far, we’ve worked our way through the continuous discovery habits sequentially. We started by defining a clear desired outcome, we interviewed to discover opportunities, we visually captured and synthesized what we were learning with experience maps and opportunity solution trees, we prioritized a target opportunity, we brainstormed solutions, we identified our hidden assumptions, we rapidly tested those assumptions, and we continued to measure impact all the way through delivery. It’s easy to think that, if we simply follow the process, we’ll come out the other side with a product that customers love. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. The reality is this process is a messy, winding path with lots of twists and turns. Most of the work in discovery is not following the process—it’s managing the cycles.

In this chapter, I’ll highlight stories of real product teams who, throughout the course of their discovery work, learned something surprising along the way. The surprise required that they stop charging forward and instead loop back to a previous step. You’ll meet a team at Simply Business, a UK-based insurance company, who learned after testing a series of solutions that their opportunity wasn’t as important to their customers as they had originally reported. You’ll meet a team at CarMax who tackled an evergreen opportunity by breaking it up into sub-opportunities and used assumption testing to figure out what they could do now versus what they might have to push off to later. You’ll meet a team at Farm Credit Services of America who uncovered a key value proposition that could have put their entire outcome at risk, but instead used their discovery work to drive the outcome while preserving the value proposition. And finally, you’ll meet a team at Snagajob who had the luxury of embedding with a customer and how they used that opportunity to improve customer satisfaction across their customer base.

As you read through these stories, pay particular attention to how and when the teams had to loop back to an earlier habit to help them get unstuck or to work around a new constraint. Notice how, despite these surprises, it was the same core discovery habits that helped them find their way.