 Hi everyone, my name is Barbara Porignano and today I want to talk to you about product discovery and why it's so important for the success of your product. Product discovery is a big topic and in this webinar I will just cover the main concepts but I will also suggest you some readings and so you can go ahead and learn more about it. So let's get to it. First of all, something about me. A long time ago I studied fine arts and web design. I worked in the gaming industry for over 16 years and I'm now product director at King. You've probably heard of some of our games like Candy Crush Saga, Crash Bandicoot on the run, Bubble Witch Saga, Farm Hero Saga and so on. So if you have any questions after this webinar please just get in touch with me either here in the chat or on LinkedIn. So let's start. Now I'm pretty sure that some of you found themselves in a similar situation. If not, you probably will at some point. A lot of companies out there are still following this waterfall model where the list of requirements drive design and the development. Typically in a waterfall model, product management would look something like this. The product manager acts more or less as a bridge between the business and the engineering team. This is an illustration I took from the blog of Teresa Torres. For those who don't know her yet, she teaches me and writes about continuous product discovery. She's great. Just go and have a look and you will learn a lot about product discovery. So what usually happens in a waterfall model is that first the stakeholder or business leaders decide what to build. The product manager gathers the requirements from the stakeholders or from the business leaders. Then the product manager writes down the list of requirements and gives to the engineering team for implementation. If the team has a designer, very often they don't. She then would go and create a design based on those requirements. The engineers would build software based on the design or on the requirements provided. So what's wrong with this way of working? In my opinion, the list is pretty long. I'm just going to mention the most important ones. First, risk of falling in the trap of delivering outputs instead of outcomes. You'll find that many companies celebrate the delivery of features and measure their success by the amount of features delivered. But later they discovered that those features didn't bring any value and wasted a lot of time and money. In my time as product manager, I've seen this happening quite a few times. Years to deliver loan projects with hundreds of features and then in the end they didn't really solve the real problem and didn't bring anybody to the users or to the business. Second, business needs often don't need customer needs. User won't buy or adopt your product because they were not interested in the first place or even worse they didn't need it. Three, loss of talent and team motivation. As Marty Kagan says, this model creates a team of mercenaries instead of missionaries. But what does this mean? A team of missionaries is engaged, is motivated, has a deep understanding of the business context, has empathy for the customer. They have an objective to achieve, a problem to solve, or maybe new opportunities. While a team of mercenaries is not empowered, has no real passion for the problem to solve as they are basically told what to do. They have almost no contact with customers. So they're just taking orders and executing them. In my experience, I can tell you that the best engineers, key ways, designers would just lead the mercenary team and seek more exciting challenges somewhere else where they feel more empowered. Number four, the stakeholders' requirements are often not based on actual data but rather on self-convention and fifth, complex and unusable product filled with a lot of features that might never be used. This is just a short list of what I think that there is more to add to this, of course. So product discovery. If we want to shift to an outcome-based way of working, we need to embrace product discovery. The aim of product discovery is to gather evidence so that we don't end up building a useless product. What are the main activities of product discovery? Understand and state a problem or a new opportunity. What is sure we're trying to solve for the users? What needs are we trying to satisfy with this work? Number two, identify the value and any business risk. So will the customer buy this or choose to use it? Will this work make sense for our business? And number three, discover the possible solutions in collaboration with the product, stakeholders, engineering and design. So it's a team effort. It's not like an individual work. So first things first, if we want to succeed with product discovery, we first need to do a couple of things. So yes, let's start from the basis. In my personal experience, before jumping into product discovery work, there are a few things we must take into consideration. First, change people's mindsets. That also includes educating leadership in many cases and promote a different way of working by bringing engineers as close to discovery as possible. So move to a more collaborative model like it's displayed in this picture. This is still a game from Theresa Parks. For the product trio, which is made of product manager, designer, and lead engineer, they work together with stakeholders and the other engineers in the team. So it's not going to be easy and it's a slow process changing people's mindsets, but can be done. Number two, start thinking in outcomes rather than outputs. This means that you and your team need to think about the success of your work, the value that brings to the business and the users, and notice the number of features delivered. It is a big change in the mindset. Number three, I think this is very important. Become familiar with UX techniques. Although I believe that everything to the UX designer sometimes is not possible. And product manager often have to wear multiple hats. That's why it's important to be familiar with UX concepts. Number four, make sure you have a solid product vision and mission that your team is fully aware of on board and on board with that. Without clear objectives, you and your team are not going anywhere really. So make sure that whatever problems you're trying to solve maps to one of the objectives you and your team have been assigned. For example, if your team is dedicated to customer retention, then you want to be sure that the work you're about to start is related to that. And it's contributed to the success of the objective. Number five, you want to be able to measure the success of your work. Key results should be discussed and agreed as soon as possible with your team and with your stakeholders. This is super important. Opportunity solution three. I also suggest you to visually represent your product discovery process so that you can see clearly the different journeys you might take to reach the outcome. So back in 2016, Teresa Torres, a product discovery coach, created a type of map called the opportunity solution three or OST. I personally think it's a very simple and effective way to streamline the discovery journey. It also has the great benefit of resolving the problem of choosing between business needs and customer needs. We should always aim at bringing value to the business, but we'd always be the customer in mind. So this is how I work with the opportunity solution three. I'll just give you a very simple real case example. In the business outcome, you describe the business problem or means, for example, increase customer retention. Ideally, this outcome is very clear and you have discussed it with your product leader. In the product domain outcome, you write how your product domain can contribute to the business outcome, and that would be your focus. For example, if a product domain is responsible for content, you could be retaining more customers by releasing more content into production. Of course, you need some data support to support this assumption. In the opportunity space, you outline the customer needs, their problems and wishes that if they're addressed, they will contribute to achieve your desired product outcome. For example, if a product domain desired outcome is to release content faster, you could run some interviews with the content designers and find out that they don't have time to create more content because they spend hours navigating the tool they use or that they have to go through a long entities process before being able to release content into production. So one of the opportunities here could be make time for designers. From there, you keep exploring until you have evaluated some possible solutions, which are the outputs, and those solutions need to be validated with tests so that we can evaluate which solutions bring more value to the customers in a way that would create value for the business. In this case, increase retention. The opportunity solution tree is a living document, so don't think that this is done once and then that's it. Now, you need to update it based on your findings for the interviews with customers and the experimentations. You should also make sure you can measure how the product outcome will bring value to the business. All these is product discovery, basically. So there is a lot of material out there that can help you with product discovery. I'm just going to mention a few techniques that I personally find super useful. Of course, each technique is based on your specific situation, so you need to decide which one is more suitable for your specific needs. Product decision based on evidence and data, one of the main responsibilities of the product manager is to understand when it's time to say no to the stakeholder request, because making the wrong product decision can be quite costly. Cost of development, employment, maintenance, time to market opportunity cost, and so on. So we need to make product decisions based on evidence and data as much as possible. I quite like this confidence meter created by Ithama Rila, the least common types of tests and evidence you might have and what confidence level they provide. This will give you an idea of the quality of indicators that we already have, how many of them, and what we need to do next to be more confidence before putting anything into development. Often we take product decision based on the fact that any French person in the company is asking for it. That's a very common problem. And trust me, that could lead to disaster. In my years of experience as product manager, I've seen projects going on for years that led to nowhere. And often they were based on solutions dictated already by someone with no data to back it up or any kind of product discovery made. And it often ends up with users not adopting that solution or is too late. They were never asked if they needed it or wanted it. And yeah, the situation should be able to. In the end, you as a product manager will be the one accountable for the outcome of that work. Design thinking, to understand the problem we want to solve, validate the new opportunity and discover the best solution, I strongly recommend to get familiar with the design thinking process. What is design thinking? It's an alternative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumption, and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding. At the same time, design thinking provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. Typically, the five phases of design thinking are empathize with the users, define the user needs, put the problem and your insights, ideate by challenging assumption and creating ideas for innovative solutions, prototyping, start creating solutions, and test the solutions with users. These five phases are not always sequential. They don't have to follow any specific order and can occur in parallel and repeat iteratively. So to accomplish each phase, you can use different techniques. Of course, we don't have time to discuss all of them, but I'll give you just a few examples. So the first stage of the design thinking process is that we must empathize with our users. We need to gain a deep understanding of the users that would be using our product, their needs, emotions, and motivations. There are wide range of methods out there for learning more about people and here are listed some. First, conduct user interviews. You can find some templates online that you can use for the interviews with some good questions for us. Then observe users in their environment, possibly in a passive mode. So don't interfere with them. Step in their shoes and adopt their mindset. So do what they are trying to do and understand their frustrations. The Concierge test technique, which I mentioned here, is a really good method to develop empathy with your users. Basically, you do your user job for a while so that you can see how to show you how to do their job and you can see how frustrated they are doing the job, what's missing in the pipeline. Now, it's important to say that even if you're lacking of UX design in your team, by no means you should be a head job owner. In fact, as product manager, you should be actively engaging with design thinking activities as much as possible and involve the engineers team as well whenever they have time. This is perhaps the most challenging part of the design thinking that we find the actual definition of the problem. Here's where we analyze and synthesize all the findings from the previous stage and we state the problem that will then guide our team during the solution evaluation phase. It's a bit like putting together a puzzle, resolving a puzzle of information in a way that, of course, makes sense. There are different methods out there. Here I listed the empathy mapping and the space of saturation and work. Basically, with both methods, you can put all your observations and finding from the empathy stage in one place in a visual way. You can use post-its, photos, and whatever artifacts you use during the previous phase. You can connect all the dots. Finally, this is the stage where you and the team finally generate ideas for possible solutions. There are hundreds of ideation methods, brainstorm, mind map, sketch, storyboard, workshop, prototype, etc. You probably also generate some crazy ideas, which is good. That's really good at this stage. Prototype and test. The method of prototyping is used to produce a chip and scale down version of the product. In this stage, you want to identify any problems with the current design and you want to observe a sample of users interacting with it. You can then use the results of this test to redefine the problem established in the previous phases of the design thinking process and change the solution. You can also use this phase to see whether there is an interest whatsoever in the product. Sometimes there is not. Of course, every situation requires a different prototyping and testing method. You will have to choose the one suitable for your situation. Here are some examples. Paper prototyping. I love this one. It's a chip and fun way of prototyping digital user interfaces. You can do it as an activity with your team and users and it doesn't require any technical skills. The intention here is to simulate digital interaction, but in a paper format. You don't observe users trying to navigate through the papers and get feedback early before investing into development. This is a good example I found on YouTube. It gives you an idea of how it works. At King, sometimes we use this method to try new games idea or test some changes to the user interface. Then, of course, we have the result of us. You use the result of us prototype to test with users a concept functionality that does not exist yet, but appears to be real because someone is controlling it behind the scenes. It's quite fun to do it. A good example of user result of us prototyping was made by a company called our part, if I remember correctly, to design their social interface. They basically wanted to learn if their service concept would work before building a new text. They used an instant messaging system and a team of people behind the scenes that were physically resulting the questions to the right people. Then we have the Factor or Factor test. It's a really good method to evaluate if there is any interesting product, any feature or functionality. It can save you a lot of time in development costs. For example, you can have a subscribe button to your product page and measure the conversion rate on that button, but a fake one. After some time, you'll have a sense of how many visitors might sign up and you can decide whether to proceed or not. You need to be careful with this test because some people might get annoyed, so it's good to have some sort of warning saying after the click and nothing happens. Just say, hey, we're trying to measure your interest in this new feature, so they don't see that nothing happens and they get annoyed. Then we have the high fidelity prototypes, which are mainly designed to sketch, figment, vision, and so on. High fidelity prototypes allow us to test user experience without going for a development process. This will require a bit more design skills, so that's your design and you should be doing this. But you can learn it. It's actually a lot of fun if you're into design. Finally, some of my favorite readings, first paper prototyping by Caroline Snyder is found. It's a good book to read and learn how to use this method. It's by Marty Kegel. This is a must-have book for anyone interested in product margin. It's really basic reading for product margin. He's keeping the build track by Melissa Perry. She also has a great podcast on Spotify. Continuous discovery habits by Teresa Torres. This is a great new book, and we'll give you the rest structure to follow in order to discover solutions for product that customers will want to know. Use the story mapping by Jeff Papton. This is a classic book. It will help your team stay focused on users and their needs. Finally, check out the Interaction Design Foundation to learn more about design thinking. That's all. Thank you so much for having me here. Please, any questions just ask. You can also call me directly on LinkedIn through my LinkedIn address. Bye-bye.