Introduction

It was 2013. I was leading a product and design team at a venture-backed startup in San Francisco. We were developing a product that created real value for our customers. It was a noble cause—we helped college students find their first job out of college. In our discovery, we uncovered a key insight that had the potential to disrupt our industry (more on that in Chapter 11). I had a partner, our head of engineering, who was a dream to work with. We became fast friends. I was mentoring a young designer whom I had known since she was nine years old—the daughter of a good friend of mine. I encouraged a young engineer, a recent math major from the University of Washington, to get up to speed with machine learning. I was relying on him to help us realize our product vision and was thrilled that, as a company, we were investing in young talent. I loved coming to work each day. And then one day, I walked in and quit.

I was tired. Not from the typical startup rat race. We weren’t working long hours, rushing from release to release, moving fast and breaking things (like the early Facebook adage). By the time I joined, the company had grown out of the speed-at-all-costs startup stage (if it ever had one). Instead, I was tired of the day-to-day reality of evangelizing product management at yet another founder-led startup. I was tired of sitting in conference rooms arguing with executives about our product strategy when I was the only one who had spent time with our customers. I was tired of debating with sales reps about why we weren’t going to build every feature that prospects requested. I was tired of having to convince my colleagues that a relentless focus on customers was a better strategy than obsessing about our competitors. Sadly, this is the work of a product executive.

I was lucky. As an undergraduate, I was exposed to human-centered design at Stanford University. I graduated and naively thought business would be human centered. I spent the first 14 years of my career continuously disappointed that this wasn’t the case. And in 2013, I had had enough. I loved building products. I loved working with engineers. But I realized that, if I worked to change one startup at a time, I’d burn myself out. Instead, I took some time to reflect on how I could have a bigger impact, and I realized that companies fell into the trap of chasing the next sale or obsessing about their competitors because many companies (especially startups) didn’t have a better model for product management. They didn’t know what good looked like.

So I didn’t just walk away from a job that day. I walked into my next career as a product-discovery coach. For the past seven years, I’ve been teaching product teams how to create successful products by obsessing about customer needs, pain points, and desires. I started with one-on-one product-manager coaching. I quickly learned that it wasn’t enough to develop product managers, and my coaching evolved to teaching product managers, designers, and engineers how to make team decisions about what to build. With time, I came to view my coaching curriculum as a product in and of itself, and I started to measure the impact of how I coached. I tracked cohorts, I measured where teams got stuck, I iterated on my methods. Over time, my curriculum got better, and, as a result, the product teams that I worked with got better. Today, teams walk away from my 12-week coaching program equipped with an arsenal of continuous discovery habits that help them discover, iterate, and refine products that deliver value for their customers in a way that drives value for their businesses. My goal with this book is to share those habits with you in the hopes that you, too, will be inspired to spend more time with your customers. The world needs better products. It’s up to us to make that happen. This book will teach you how.