Case Study: Continuous Discovery Habits

Happy Monday everyone! Lots going on in the Cleveland Product community, so let’s get to it!

Article of the Week

Product Managers love to build stuff that solves problems for customers. But many times we don’t have enough time to talk to the people using the stuff we build. Maybe our organization has too many priorities. Maybe we are putting out too many fires. Maybe we’re working on too many pet projects for senior leaders. How can we focus our organizations on the customer problem, so that we build what is most important and impactful for them?

The best way to do that is to intimately know the problems of our customers, and to regularly check in with them. Teresa Torres lays out a nice framework to talking to customers in her book Continuous Discovery Habits. The idea of talking to your customers is obvious, but sometimes it is hard to put it into practices. How often to you talk to them? Who do you involve in those interviews? How do you aggregating their insights and share them internally? How do you convince others within the organization to do this regularly?

Doing all of that is very difficult, and may sound daunting. So start small. If others can’t join, do it yourself. If you can’t find customers, just politely ask some highly-engaged customers. Or do a mass outreach and ask for volunteers. The below article gives a good example of how Bianca Starling, a Senior Product Manager from Voxy, slowly rolled out the Continuous Discovery Habits framework and got the backing and support needed to apply it throughout the organization.

Product Jobs of the Week

The Product roles at Cleveland companies keep rolling in!

• Sherwin-Williams - Global Product Manager

• Equity Trust - Product Manager

• Step2 - Product Manager

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About the Author

My name is Shawn Leitner. I started the Cleveland Product networking group in 2017, which helps to connect Product professionals around Cleveland, providing them with a forum to network, learn, and share stories. For my day job, I'm a Product Consultant & Coach for Pathfinder Product and help clients implement strong Product practices so they can create products that their teams love building and their customers love using. Connect with me on LinkedIn or feel free to attend one of my events either virtually or in-person. Always up for meeting for a cup of coffee also!