Every post I add a character that inspires me. Today, Don Norman. His writing and talks made me realize that I do technology for humans and to be great at product I needed to understand humans. Technology done by humans for humans.
Every time someone asks me how to improve the outcomes of a product teams I start with some questions:
How often are you in contact with customers?
How does the team get information about the customer?
How do people in the team communicate about the customer problems they are solving right now?
Continuous Discovery should be the answer to all these questions.
Getting in contact with customers often (I advocate for weekly customer interviews) is not a task for the Product Manager or the Designer or the UX Researcher. Everyone in the team must be in direct contact with customers. Frequency can vary depending on the position. But PM, designer and tech lead must preferably be in (or watch records of) all of them.
Then the magic happens. Everyone in the team start to be curious about the customers problems. Talking about quantitive data becomes easier as they relate not to some abstraction but to real inputs from users. The team start to understand (and to question) every part of their product and use real examples to explain why they think that is the plausible solution.
Everyone becomes curious about testing and they are intrigued when things do not go according to the plan - reinforcing the cycle of iteration and test.
Continuous Discovery is a powerful communication and collaboration tool. It brings the focus back to the real challenge of a product team. As Don Norman states:
"the entire argument between features and simplicity is misguided. People might very well desire more capability and ease of use, but do not equate this to more features or to simplicity. What people want is usable devices, which translates into understandable ones."
Making products is an exercise on humility. Most things don't work. We need to avoid the human nature of confirming our wishful thoughts. This brings a lot of anti-patterns to the discovery process. Continuous discovery with the whole team is the antidote - you can deceive your self but rarely a whole team.
Always be curious.
Thanks for reading!