HERE BE DRAGONS / Product, Discovery, and how not to mess it up

When I lived in Seattle, a friend bought a boat. He described it as ‘a hole in the water that you throw money into.’ In the Product world, that’s a pretty accurate description of Discovery – you never know how long it’s going to take or what you’re going to get out of it.

Even worse, we use the word Discovery to mean a lot of things – yet most of the time, we don’t discover anything new. Other people (current or potential customers) already know this stuff, we’re simply hoping to learn.

In this talk, I cover what Discovery actually means, the part we’re almost universally bad at (the initial inquiry, which is needed before we make OKRs or place other bets), and give practical advice about how you can employ a new technique to do this. (The technique has already been used with a number of clients, including Facebook, Nike and Capital One.)