22.03.2024

How Continuous Discovery reveals the hidden potential in your business

Imagine your business as an iceberg. What customers see—the product or service that you have built—is just the tip above the water. But beneath the surface lies an undiscovered world of opportunities and insights.

Uncovering hidden opportunities

I'm Anders, a Senior UX Designer at Adapt. I would like to introduce you to the process of Continuous Discovery Habits, pioneered by the great Teresa Torres and Marty Cagan. It's the process that lets us dive beyond the obvious, to uncover hidden opportunities for your business and make sure that you spend your time building the right product to obtain the illusive product-market fit. It is no simple task. In fact a large majority of new products fail - the most prominent reason being their lack of product-market fit.

I am sure you know the feeling. You have gotten this great idea and enthusiastically motivate your team to get going. You spend time describing the idea and splitting it up into manageable user stories that encompass the suite of features that you intend. Your designer carries out your vision beautifully and your developers deliver everything in scope, in time and within budget. Sounds perfect, right? Perfect up until you release, and learn that you missed the mark, or another solution would’ve been a better fit.

For instance, while designing a carbon emissions dashboard for one of our clients, our discovery process led to some surprises. We thought it was all about putting the data out there for the users for reporting purposes, but realized that there was a clear actionable user desire to easily switch to lower-emitting materials, without performing time-consuming analysis themselves, ultimately pivoting the priorities in the solution.

If you’re not checking, you’re guessing

Continuous Discovery is an ongoing process and mindset involving customer research, data analysis, and iterative and early testing. The aim? To consistently uncover insights that can drive you towards your business outcomes (important word: outcomes, not outputs, solutions or thingies). This notion might be self explanatory to some of you - of course you are already spending time driving your business forward.

So, you may wonder, "Why should I care?" Well, in a rapidly changing world, picking the right direction (and validating it) is more crucial than ever, and you want to be sure that you do not throw your hard earned money into the wrong pit. If you’re not checking, you’re guessing.

Traditionally, the role of UX and product has always been a balance between delivery and discovery, tipping towards delivery with limited space for exploration. In my opinion, with the advent of productivity increasing AI tools (sorry, had to throw it in there - this is 2024 after all) like ChatGPT, Devin or Copilot , discovery and UX research are now crucial, not optional. As product delivery becomes more standardized and perhaps even commoditized, what stands out even more than before is what product you build and the specific problems it solves, not your capability to deliver and build it itself.

Diving deeper - the process in action

Thingies versus outcomes

Remember how I mentioned the outcomes vs thingies earlier? One very important fundamental understanding is that we work towards business outcomes and measure progress towards them, and not our capability to “deliver features”. The impact of the feature for your users is what matters, not the feature itself. This does not have to be a big thing that takes weeks to accomplish, but having this conversation in your team is important. In Adapt we always try to do this and work towards a shared vision, so that we know what we’re working towards - it makes both the team happier and the results better.

Consider a funnel where you get increasingly specific. You start with your product vision - the destination and future state of your product. From this desired future state, you articulate a product strategy - how do you get there. Based on this strategy, you can formulate a set of objectives and key results (OKRs) - the actual goals that your team will work towards making the vision come to life. Use these as your opportunity space, the themes that will serve as the starting point for your product discovery. You now know what your objectives and what success looks like, so you can start working towards it.

Diving deeper - the process of continuous discovery

The trio

In the realm of Continuous Discovery we operate with the "Product Trio" — comprised of the Product Manager, Designer, and Engineer. The product trio is key to mitigating the four big risks that should be evaluated in any project, because the trio represent the broad set of skills needed to build products. If these specific roles don’t apply to your team then don’t fret - let’s instead talk about their responsibilities, which will definitely be represented in your team.

This is by no means groundbreaking, but having the right people evaluate the opportunities and solutions through this lens minimizes the risk and optimizes the chances of hitting the target. This is an ambition for all our clients, and we make sure to gather the trio for all big product decisions.

Tools of the trade

Here are some of the essential tools you'll need to get going. By the way - this is not a one-and-done kind of deal, it is a set of habits that you will need to integrate as a part of your weekly workflow for it to be truly valuable.

Enough talk, let's get started

Personally, continuous discovery habits have fundamentally transformed how I approach design. These habits act like a compass, allowing me to visualize the ways a design opportunity can unfold. It’s not only about sketching out a solution; it’s about exploring all the paths that could potentially lead to that solution, and understanding which of those align best with our business outcomes. It has shifted my mindset from simply figuring out 'how best to build something' to strategically exploring 'what best should be built', neatly packaged in a pragmatic and uncomplicated visual overview.

So, are you ready to discover what lies beneath your business iceberg? Gather your trio (or quartet), and start by identifying your main objectives. If you don’t know where to start, here’s a set of prompts and questions that you can ask your team to start defining some business outcomes. Then use tools like OKRs and Opportunity Solution Trees to explore opportunities. Hone in on these with Assumption Tests and then get your hands dirty with real-world experiments. Keep your finger on the pulse through ongoing user involvement and analytics. Loop, refine, adapt, repeat - et voilà - you’re now hitting the mark much more precisely than before.