Product Strategy and Discovery

It is the group that decides about the product: whoever leads product management (is it worth it for the business and the user?), whoever leads design (can it be used?) and whoever leads technology (can it be built, and at what cost?). The idea was popularized by Marty Cagan and Teresa Torres, who calls it the product trio.

Why: when those three perspectives decide separately, ideas reach development unvalidated, or it turns out late that they cannot be built. Together, they spot earlier what does not work.

Not every team has one. Sometimes there is nobody from design, or technology finds out once everything is decided. In that case, part of the work is assembling it: who covers each perspective, and how they decide together.

Whoever leads defines the what and the why; the trio, how to get there. Leadership sets the strategy and the business results that matter. The trio decides which opportunities to attack and which solutions to test in order to move them.

The hardest change is usually right there: going from a leadership that asks for features to one that asks for results and trusts the team to find the way. That is why we also work with the leaders, in parallel to the cycles.

We do not discard them: we treat them as hypotheses. We ask which result they seek and how we would know if they achieve it. Many times they stand; other times a small experiment shows a cheaper way to reach the same result, or that it does not move it. Either way, the decision is made with evidence and not by who asked for it.

It is the explicit definition of who the product is for, which problem it solves and which business result it seeks.

What it is for: so that prioritizing stops being a negotiation of requests, and so that a change of strategy reaches what gets built.

If you want to know more: How to create a successful product strategy (in Spanish).

It is a map that starts from a business result, breaks it into opportunities (user problems and needs) and only then into solutions and experiments.

What it is for: so that every backlog item is explained by the opportunity it attacks, and to discard the ideas that do not move the result before building them.

If you want to know more: They asked me for something impossible… where do I start? (in Spanish)

It is the continuous work of talking to users and testing assumptions with cheap experiments: interviews, observation, low- and high-fidelity prototypes.

What it is for: to reduce the risk of investing development in something that does not solve a real problem.

If you want to know more: the Product Discovery guide and the Experiments Canvas (in Spanish).

It is how teams, roles and decisions are organized around products instead of projects.

What it is for: so that teams have continuity and are measured by the results they achieve, not by delivering a fixed scope. Without that change, the trio decides well but runs into a budget and a plan designed by project.