The Prerequisite Mindsets
Many teams chase frameworks, tools, and methodologies, hoping that each new innovation will suddenly unlock the door to product success. However, for most frameworks, tools, and methodologies to be successful, it’s not just your tactics that need to change but also your mindset. The same will be true for the tactics in this book. There are six mindsets that must be cultivated to successfully adopt the habits outlined in this book.
1. Outcome-oriented: The first mindset is both a mindset and a habit. You’ll learn more about the habit in the coming chapters, but the mindset requires that you start thinking in outcomes rather than outputs. That means rather than defining your success by the code that you ship (your output), you define success as the value that code creates for your customers and for your business (the outcomes). Rather than measuring value in features and bells and whistles, we measure success in impact—the impact we have had on our customers’ lives and the impact we have had on the sustainability and growth of our business.
2. Customer-centric: The second mindset places the customer at the center of our world. It requires that we not lose sight of the fact (even though many companies have) that the purpose of business is to create and serve a customer. We elevate customer needs to be on par with business needs and focus on creating customer value as well as business value.
3. Collaborative: The third mindset requires that you embrace the cross-functional nature of digital product work and reject the siloed model, where we hand off deliverables through stage gates. Rather than the product manager decides, the designer designs, and the engineer codes, we embrace a model where we make team decisions while leveraging the expertise and knowledge that we each bring to those decisions.
4. Visual: The fourth mindset encourages us to step beyond the comfort of spoken and written language and to tap into our immense power as spatial thinkers. The habits in this book will encourage you to draw, to externalize your thinking, and to map what you know. Cognitive psychologists have shown in study after study that human beings have an immense capacity for spatial reasoning.3 The habits in this book will help you tap into that capacity.
5. Experimental: The fifth mindset encourages you to don your scientific-thinking hat. Many of us may not have scientific training, but, to do discovery well, we need to learn to think like scientists identifying assumptions and gathering evidence. The habits in this book will help you develop and hone an experimental mindset.
6. Continuous: And finally, these habits will help you evolve from a project mindset to a continuous mindset. Rather than thinking about discovery as something that we do at the beginning of a project, you will learn to infuse discovery continuously throughout your development process. This will ensure that you are always able to get fast answers to your discovery questions, helping to ensure that you are building something that your customers want and will enjoy.