Product Discovery is messy. These five techniques help me to stay in control.
Bring a delivery mindset to discovery work, without killing the creativity
I started my career as a Project Manager. Freshly Prince2-certified, I diligently broke down work packages, mapped out Gantt charts, mitigated risks, and checked off completed tasks. It was all very neat, clear, and easy to follow.
But when I moved into Product Management, I suddenly had a big role in deciding what to build next. Learning about “product discovery” was dizzying. There was so much to consider.
All the discovery activities alongside building, shipping, and landing features were a lot to juggle. I struggled to chart a clear path forward or to communicate the wider plan.
But over the years I’ve learned some simple techniques that have helped me to regain the control that I enjoyed in my project management years. In this article I’ve set out the five frameworks that have helped me to tame the product discovery beast.
Exploring options
1. Opportunity-Solution Trees
Teresa Torres’s Opportunity-Solution Trees are a great way to shift mindsets from delivery to discovery. They provide structured collaboration and communication around product discovery and really help me to clarify my thinking.
Opportunity-Solution Trees encourage you to consider a range of opportunities that might contribute to the outcome that you’re aiming towards. Then they prompt you to consider the possible solutions that might deliver on those opportunities. (For opportunities, read a user need, desire, or pain point.) Breaking the tree down more helps you to track assumption tests. These tests help you to assess how much the proposed solution can help you reach your goal.
Using opportunity-solution trees shifts the focus from “how do we deliver X?” to “which options best help us reach our target outcome?”.
My top tips for opportunity-solution trees are:
Focus on a single product outcome. Don’t use your tree to map out the full range of ways that your product could drive your business forward, as it will quickly become overwhelming.
If you’re struggling to identify a single product outcome to focus on, then you’re missing a clear product strategy. Work on that first, at least to the point that you know what outcome is the most valuable to focus on right now. (Here’s a great Product Breaks article on product strategy.)
Think of your tree as providing a snapshot of the status of your discovery. So annotate it to show where you’ve ruled out options, and to highlight the key data points and useful insights that you’ve learned along the way. But balance that with keeping the tree easy to digest and understand. Link through to documents for more detailed learnings and explanations where necessary.
Choosing a path
2. RICE scoring
Intercom developed RICE to assist with prioritisation decisions. It uses quantifiable measures of Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort to calculate a RICE score. When choosing between a list of similar options, it helps to highlight where you can make the biggest impact in the shortest time. I’ve found that the RICE metrics add a useful framing to solution ideas, which help me to prioritise which discovery activities to focus on next.
But my experience has taught me to use RICE with caution. The comfort of the maths can give you a false sense of certainty if used in the wrong way. You should be careful not to use it as a substitute for deeper thinking. Here are my tips for the effective use of RICE.
Compare apples to apples. Only use RICE to compare options aimed at the same outcome. If not, you aren’t comparing like with like. Only consider RICE when you have decided on the right outcome to strive for.
Prioritise opportunities before you prioritise solutions. You can’t do a full RICE calculation for opportunities, but you do need to assess which to focus on first. For each opportunity, find a way to evaluate its reach - the percentage of your target market that the opportunity is relevant to - before you look for solutions.
Don’t immediately dismiss low-confidence ideas. If there’s a possibility of high impact and high reach, do the work to test your assumptions and improve your confidence score. Don’t just switch to a lower-impact idea instead.
3. Confidence meter
RICE relies on an assessment of your confidence in the reach and impact of your idea. But confidence is subjective, so you need a defined scale for it to make sense. Itamar Gilad’s confidence meter provides exactly this. I love it because the scale definitions are objective, while the scoring levels are not linear. It’s designed to strongly incentivise evidence-based decision-making. A small amount of market data is 100x higher confidence than your own self-conviction. And launch data is 10x higher confidence again.
My top tips when using the confidence meter are:
Make sure you and your team always refer to it for your RICE scoring.
Continue to refer to the confidence ladder throughout the assumption testing and launch phases of your feature. When planning your release ladder, you should aim to continually de-risk the feature as you make it available to more users.
4. Assumption mapping
Assumption testing is another one of Teresa Torres’s core foundations of product discovery. After you uncover the assumptions behind your ideas, she suggests testing only the riskiest ones. Her assumption map lets you place your assumptions on a 2x2 chart, plotting their relative importance versus their level of evidence (another opportunity to use the confidence meter!). The riskiest assumptions are those with high importance but low evidence.
I love this technique because it encourages you to test only what’s crucial to ensure the idea can succeed. The reduced testing scope allows you to learn and make decisions at a faster pace, instead of building and testing entire solutions.
My top tips for assumption mapping are:
Write assumptions so they must be true for your idea to be successful. It might not sound important, but it makes it much easier to understand the meaning of proving or disproving your assumptions.
To visualise your learning, connect your assumption tests to your opportunity-solution tree.
A simple discovery-focused kanban board can be useful to track your team’s tasks needed to test your assumptions.
Planning ahead
5. GIST Board
Itamar Gilad’s GIST board maps out the Goals, Ideas, Steps, and Tasks you need to take your ideas forward into full-fledged, successful features. I’ve found GIST boards to be both similar and complementary to the opportunity-solution tree.
Opportunity-solution trees are great for moving from a blank page to a structured wealth of ideas to explore. GIST boards can then help to chart your course through that complexity. They can also connect your discovery through to delivery and launch in a way that opportunity-solution trees are less suited to.
It wasn’t immediately clear to me how opportunity-solution trees and GIST boards relate to each other or work together. So after a working with both for a while now, here are my tips for using them together.
Start with an opportunity-solution tree and use it to guide your ideation and to evaluate which avenues to explore first.
When you’ve narrowed down the solutions that you’re going to explore further, add them to your GIST board. I map ‘Solutions’ from my opportunity-solution tree map to ‘Ideas’ on my GIST board, and ‘Outcome’ to ‘Goal’.
Map out the steps needed to build confidence in the solution on your GIST board. I frame the steps as what we need to achieve to take our idea up through the levels of the confidence meter.
Track the outcome of each assumption test on your opportunity-solution map. Use the resulting increase in confidence to progress through the steps on your GIST board.
Discovery beast: tamed
Product discovery is, by definition, messy. It’s a process of exploration, experimentation and de-risking. So, it’s right that there’s not one clear path forward. But that doesn’t mean it must be chaos. These five techniques have helped me to stay in control. They’ve helped me to:
✅ Understand where to focus
✅ Chart a course forward
✅ Collaborate with ease
✅ Keep stakeholders in the loop