How to Enable Continuous Product Discovery in Your Organization

By Alton Zenon III

Moving from interacting with users on a quarterly basis to weekly is a big ask for teams that have been operating in the same way for years. This challenge, and others like it, are ones product teams face when shifting to a continuous discovery model. It’s vital that teams implementing this method put processes in place that not only facilitate that shift, but also help maintain it over time.

New York professionals experienced in practising continuous discovery told us that adoption involves ensuring the entire company is bought in. Since a single product or feature can require work from — and impact — teams across the business, product leaders should make efforts to keep the company informed and involved in the process. This kind of product development relies heavily on customer feedback throughout the product and user journey, so to teammates should keep clients engaged and communication channels open.

But sharing customer feedback by replaying full-length customer interviews after an A/B test or reading pages of survey comments is highly inefficient, so it’s essential to organize and distill feedback to determine patterns, themes and what to prioritize. Learn what techniques and tech tools New York product pros use to collect, organize and share customer feedback in their continuous discovery strategies.

What continuous discovery looks like at Collibra: We think of discovery as a two-dimensional process: what to build and how to build. Our product managers look at the latest trends and practices, collect direct input from the customers and analyze various insights into how our software is used to determine what to build. Then software architects and engineers make this information whole by providing the answers on how to build.

Tools and techniques behind effective communication: A common challenge when undergoing multidimensional growth is maintaining transparency on the product vision, strategy and roadmap. We use Aha! as our ideation platform, and we strive to keep that process transparent to everyone involved. Through open collaboration on problem statements, our ideation process is centered on getting a well-rounded understanding of the needs for specific requirements.

We couple our ideation platform with a system of voting and use demand economy principles to decide which ideas to implement. We plan to take this to the next level by assigning each customer a fixed amount of virtual currency they can use to assign their own value to a proposed feature or enhancement.

Best practices for every product org: Building a unique product is a complex balancing act of staying true to the vision and listening to customers. Being intentional about maintaining this balance is critically important.

In our earlier implementations, that balance was achieved through a configurable solution that aimed to meet the various needs of our customers, then delivering that solution based on how they were most comfortable. As we mature and we learn more about how our customers use those configurations, we’re becoming more confident and opinionated on the optimal way to address a specific need. Many of our current discovery efforts are focused on finding an optimal approach. This works best when the discovery is coupled with continuous delivery and A/B testing and when these are done in an Agile fashion.