Discovery is a "you are here" problem Every mall map and trailhead sign has that little flag: YOU ARE HERE. You can't navigate without it. New product, new company, or a discovery cycle on something vague? Same deal. The instinct is to jump straight to the roadmap. But a roadmap drawn before you've located yourself is just a confident guess about someone else's campus. Your first customer conversation isn't really about the product. It's about finding the flag. Questions like: - Walk me through the last time you dealt with this. What did you actually do? - What have you already tried? Why did you stop? - If nothing changed for a year, what would that cost you? Notice none of those pitch anything. They locate you: where the pain actually lives, what's already been ruled out, and whether this problem even matters enough to build for. Where do you start when you're handed a blank product space? What's your first question, and why that one?

Looks like nobody could make it last night. Thought I'd share where my head is at on Product Disocvery anyway, in case it's useful. I still start where I always start: BJ Fogg Fogg's model is B = MAP. Behavior happens when Motivation, Ability, and a Prompt show up at the same moment. If a behavior isn't happening, one of those three is missing. The reason I keep coming back to it for discovery is that most discovery asks people what they want. Fogg's model says wanting isn't usually the constraint. Motivation is the least reliable leg of the three because it moves around constantly. So if you build on what people say they want, you're building on the wobbliest part. Ability and prompt are where the leverage is. Practically, that changes the question. Instead of "would you use this," you ask "what happened the last time you tried to do this, and what stopped you." One gets you enthusiasm. The other gets you friction, which is the thing you can actually design against. His other idea that shows up in my work a lot: target behaviors, not outcomes. "Get healthier" isn't a behavior. "Floss one tooth" is. Most feature requests are outcomes wearing a costume, and the job is getting back to the behavior underneath. How I've traditionally thought about discovery: Interviews. Contextual inquiry. Surveys when the question is countable. Usability testing. Session replay for what happened, analytics for how often, and then talking to people for why. A repository so the last six months of learning doesn't evaporate. None of that has stopped working. Three things have genuinely shifted, and I'd separate them: - AI-moderated interviews. Running conversational interviews in parallel and getting a synthesis back the same day. This is the real change, and it's the one I'm most curious about. - Feedback aggregation. Pulling support tickets, sales calls, and surveys into one place and finding themes across all of it. Mostly this means you can now read things nobody had time to read before. Hard to argue with. - Synthetic users. AI-generated participants you interview instead of people. I haven't used them. I'm open to it, and I'm also suspicious, and I'd like to talk to someone who has.

Hey everyone, We're going live this Thursday at 6PM UK / 10AM Pacific to talk about Product Discovery. Specifically: what your discovery toolkit actually looks like right now, and how much of it has shifted in the last eighteen months. Some of the change is real and some of it is people putting a new label on things they were already doing. Worth pulling apart. A few things I want us to get into: - What does User Research look like right now? - What you're actually using AI for in discovery, honestly. Synthesis? Interview prep? Sorting through feedback you'd never have had time to read? - Where it falls down. Because the parts that were hard before (getting to the real problem, knowing which signal matters) don't seem to have gotten much easier. - Whether faster discovery is producing better decisions or just more of them. Bring your setup and bring your skepticism. The most useful sessions here are the ones where people disagree. Find the event on the calendar! See you Thursday.

Hi All, I don't often read books on Product Management...at least not until someone I trust has read it and tells me it's more than theory. But I'm picking up a couple books and will let you know if any of them meet the sniff test from me! Also, I ran across this monthly jobs report that this guy, James Gunaca creates sourced from LinkedIn. Thought I'd share: https://www.jamesgunaca.com/jobs-report I don't know much else about him but his website has some interested free resources for job seekers.