Rob Powell

All organisations that deliver products and services to customers are continuously making decisions about how to adapt their product or service to meet the needs of the customer and/or their business.

Continuous change is necessary because:-

• Customer expectations continuously change, based on their experience interacting with other products and services.
• Advancements in technology can present opportunities to deliver value propositions more efficiently of impactfuly. If we don’t take advantage of these advancements, competitors might.
• Organisations must remain compliant with the changing legal and regulatory landscape they exist in.
• Our customers tell us we need to change (either directly, or through their actions).

Change is therefore necessary if we want our business to remain viable and relevant.

The Cost of Change

The change we choose to deliver always comes at some cost. This cost is both the time, money and resources we throw at the change, and the cost of not investing in other competing change ideas.

Organisations therefore need to be careful to back the changes that will deliver the best results for them.

Discovery

Discovery is a term used to describe the set of techniques we follow in order to:-

• Continuously discover problems worth solving for our customers and our business
• Continuously discover solutions to those problems that we are confident enough in to commit our organisation’s resources.

First, discover the problem

We always make change in order to solve a particular problem in order to achieve some type of outcome that is important for our business.

Organisations need to decide which problems to tackle in which order so as to deliver against the business outcomes.

In order to discover problems, we need to regularly spend time with the users of our product or service to understand them and understand how our product or service is (or is not) meeting their needs.

We also need to spend time with the data that shows us how our product/service is being used. The data gives us the factual evidence to support what we hear from our customers and our business stakeholders.

It’s important we deal in facts, not opinion, when deciding whether or not to invest in solving a particular problem. The data also helps us to measure whether or not we have improved the situation after implementing our solution.

Getting to Confident

When we are sure we have a problem worth solving, we need to discover a solution to that problem that we have high enough confidence in to commit time, money and resources to deliver.

Having a high level of confidence in a solution means:-

• We are confident that our customers will choose to use our change, because it adds value for them.
• We are confident the solution will be accepted as viable by our business stakeholders (legal, security, commercial, cost etc)
• We are confident that this solution will be usable by our customers
• We are confident that this solution can be delivered technically.

(see Marty Cagan’s 4 Big Risks)

We want to get confidence across these dimensions before we commit to delivering our solution.

But how can we get this confidence before we start building/delivering the solution?

Discovery before Delivery

During Discovery we validate our solution ideas by running tests/experiments, as cheaply as is possible, in order to whittle down our options to those that we have confidence in.

We create simulations, prototypes, mockups, technical proof of concepts that we put in front of users, business stakeholders, engineers to get feedback and learn what does and doesn’t work. Based on what we learn, we adapt our prototypes and then test again. We repeat this process until we are sufficiently confident that our solution to the problem is valuable, viable, usable and technically achievable.

We can then begin the more expensive work of engineering these solutions, with the assurance that we are solving the right problem for the right people, with the right solution.

Continuous Discovery

Discovery should not be a one-off event. Organisations need to engage in a continuous dialogue with their customers in order to continuously discover problems to solve and solutions to these problems that we have high confidence in.

By doing this, we’ll be able to provide a continuous flow of work to our delivery teams that we are confident will deliver for our customers and for our business.