How to find time for continuous discovery

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In this episode of the Product Talk podcast, hosts Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion discuss the number one reason why people think they can't do continuous discovery: lack of time. They delve into the seven most common reasons behind this perception and provide practical tips on how to address them. Let's explore each theme and the valuable insights shared by the hosts.

🕒 Theme 1: Spending Time on Delivery-Related Activities

One common reason teams feel they don't have time for continuous discovery is that they are fully occupied with managing delivery-related activities. This includes backlogs, ticket creation, acceptance criteria, stand-ups, and overall product development.

🔧 Practical Tip: To address this, start with solution-related discovery for items still in the backlog. By identifying the riskiest assumptions and running experiments to de-risk them, teams can make progress on discovery even while managing delivery.

🕒 Theme 2: Spending Time on Stakeholder Management

Teams often find themselves spending a significant amount of time on stakeholder management, which involves communicating with interested parties about ongoing work. This can include project status reports, meetings, Gantt chart creation, and intake of new ideas.

🔧 Practical Tip: To alleviate the time spent on meetings, leverage existing artefacts to share updates with stakeholders. This can be done through email, Slack, or Teams, using visuals such as experience maps, opportunity solution trees, or story maps.

🕒 Theme 3: Spending Time on Cross-Team Coordination

Teams often face challenges with cross-team coordination, whether it's for planning future work or managing dependencies for ongoing projects. This can be due to organisational design issues, such as teams organised around tech stacks rather than customer journeys.

🔧 Practical Tip: Leaders should recognise the need for change and start decoupling teams or changing their structure to reduce interdependencies. At an individual level, visualising work and negotiating boundaries with neighbouring teams can help streamline coordination.

🕒 Theme 4: Spending Time on Product Support Activities

Teams often find themselves spending a significant amount of time on product support activities, such as responding to sales, support, and marketing teams. This can involve answering questions, triaging bugs, or addressing user experience debt.

🔧 Practical Tip: If the product is unstable or buggy, teams should prioritise stability work to shore up the product's foundation. If the issue is insufficient sales or support enablement, teams should focus on creating shared understanding through documentation, videos, or dedicated specialists.

🕒 Theme 5: Spending Time in Meetings

Teams often feel overwhelmed by the number of meetings they have to attend, both within and outside their team. This can be due to a fear of not being seen as helpful or central to the product.

🔧 Practical Tip: Audit meeting attendance and explore alternative ways to relay information, such as sharing artefacts or using asynchronous communication platforms.

🕒 Theme 6: Lack of Value for Discovery in the Organization

In some organizations, discovery is not valued as much as delivery-related activities. It may be seen as a delay or unnecessary.

🔧 Practical Tip: Leaders need to recognise the importance of discovery and emphasize its value. Teams should challenge confirmation biases through assumption mapping and testing, even for solutions considered inevitable. Share existing artefacts to avoid recreating explanations.

🕒 Theme 7: Discovery Itself Takes Too Much Time

Teams may feel that discovery itself takes too long, leading to a perception that they don't have time for it. This can be due to a lack of tools, inefficient processes, or a learning curve for new teams.

🔧 Practical Tip: Focus on the most important and least known aspects of the product. Experiment with different types of tests and invest in tools and processes to expedite discovery.

As always from Torres, this episode has lots of valuable insights and practical tips for overcoming the perceived lack of time for continuous discovery. Try a few out or dig deeper into the episode with our episode GPT below.

Timestamps: 

  • 00:00:00 Introduction and context

  • 00:00:48 Reasons behind the lack of time for continuous discovery

  • 00:01:29 Spending time on delivery-related activities

  • 00:03:07 Spending time on stakeholder management

  • 00:05:17 Spending time on cross-team coordination

  • 00:08:50 Spending time on product support activities

  • 00:13:42 Spending time in meetings

  • 00:16:59 Lack of value for discovery in the organization

  • 00:21:56 Discovery itself takes too much time

  • 00:26:05 Conclusion and key takeaways

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