In 2012, an engineer was asked to share the vision of a radical new project he was leading, the reason for it existing. His response was that the device his team was working on would help people achieve two things: it would allow them to connect to others through pictures and video (something, he said, no device was “specifically engineered” to do), and that it would help people process information very quickly. What do you think this product might be? In 2012, Skype, Instagram, and Whatsapp were already in existence, as were the Kindle, the iPad, and the Raspberry Pi. These are all very different products that help many different people do many different things aligning to the goals described by this engineer, but none are the product that was being referred to.
What was the product in question?
It was the Google Glass, as described by its co-creator Babek Parviz. The Google Glass ended up as a spectacular failure, not because it couldn’t be built, but because it was a solution without a problem.
So why did the Google Glass fail, becoming fodder for tech reviewers and journalists, as well as a major privacy concern as wearers wore them everywhere, for example into public restrooms? Although it was prototyped and worked on by some of the most experienced engineers in wearable technology, Google readily admitted it didn’t have a clear idea of who it was building the product for. It didn’t have a business model worked out, although there were never plans to use it for advertising. And it certainly wasn’t asking important ethical questions around privacy. Eventually the plan became to release the product to early adopters and figure it out from there. This wasn’t enough.
Discovery is where we start with questions
Over a decade later, we know the antidote to making such public and expensive product mistakes. That’s at the heart of discovery, the process development teams use to de-risk products to find solutions that are feasible, viable, usable, and, ideally, ethical (Google Glass, remember, was only feasible). Although we know that discovery is the right place to start, it doesn’t make it easy. It’s still tempting to start with what we believe we know to be true, without remembering that unless we have well-documented evidence, these are merely assumptions.
In How Big Things Get Done, Bent Flyvbjerg explores how good planning impacts success. Consider the problem of connecting an island to the mainland, he suggests, and all the questions that might be raised about building a bridge to do the job. But if we stop to consider why we might be connecting these land masses in the first place-- To encourage tourism? To speed up emergency services responses? To make commuting faster?-- we realise there are many more ideas available: tunnels, boats, helipads, or even, if it is not physical connection that is required, faster internet at a much lower cost. The point Flyvbjerg is making is twofold: that you must know what you want to achieve, and that asking good questions will get you there. “The cause of good planning is the range and depth of the questions it asks and the imagination and the rigor of the answers it delivers,” he writes. “Notice that I put “questions” before “answers”. It’s self-evident that questions come before answers. Or rather, it should be self-evident. Unfortunately, it’s not. Projects routinely start with answers, not questions.”
Questions frame discovery
A well-formed question sets you on the right course when you are starting a discovery. It defines what you need to learn, and helps ensure that your team and stakeholders are aligned on the problem space before you jump into solutions.
Questions help create better insights, make better decisions, and achieve better outcomes. To ensure you’re starting with strong questions, they should be:
Aligned to the business - laddering up to the strategic direction of the company
Outcome-oriented - specific about how success is measured, beyond delivering outputs
User-centric - tied to the needs and behaviours associated with real customers and end-users
Open, yet focused - leaving room for exploration while still defining the above
But you also can’t settle on a question for discovery in a vacuum. All around are stakeholders and colleagues with different perspectives and domain knowledge who hold different pieces of the puzzle. Gather these as inputs; not only will this help you start with better questions, but it will allow you to kick off your discovery with stakeholder collaboration.
Opportunities emerge from questions
When you start with strong questions, you can then use user research to find unmet needs and desires that, if solved, will create real value for them and in turn capture value back into your business. These unmet needs and desires are the opportunities that should make up your roadmap and ladder back up to your goal.
By using user interviews, product data, and market insights, opportunities can be assessed and prioritised so that they are solving meaningful problems, rather than random ideas.
Assumptions shape the risks we need to test
Every opportunity comes with assumptions—beliefs we hold about users, the market, or the implementation approach that may not be true. Before we commit to a solution, we need to surface these assumptions and test the riskiest ones that, should they be false, would cause our product to fail. Once we begin to move from the problem space into the solution space through ideation, our assumptions will also become more tangible. In Continuous Discovery Habits, Teresa Torres makes suggestions for surfacing assumptions, including story mapping, walking the lines of an Opportunity Solution Tree if you are using that tool in your discovery, or conducting a pre-mortem (Shreyas Doshi, product leader and coach, has this template for a pre-mortem that I particularly like).
Testing assumptions is also the smallest place to start, rather than testing ideas through prototypes, which although cheaper than code, still take time and resources to create and iterate on.
At every stage of discovery there are questions
Asking questions isn’t admitting ignorance, but rather a demonstration of openness and curiosity that denotes respect for our customers, our colleagues, our business, and our work.
Strong questions allow us to frame our discovery, ensuring we are focused on the right problem.
Opportunities are the valuable pain points and needs to solve for or the chances to delight that we uncover.
Assumptions are the risks to the success of your product across feasibility, viability, usability, and ethical risk.
After all, Google attempted to learn from the demise of Google Glass by revamping the project under the leadership of Tony Fadell, who had created Nest and previously worked at Apple. The New York Times reported that Fadell planned to completely redesign the Google Glass, and that as a product person “he’s not going to release something until it’s perfect.” That was in 2015.