John De Goes’ blog

Agile practices and exhaustive product discovery are often incompatible. Traditional product discovery follows a waterfall approach, seeking comprehensive validation and documentation before starting the building phase, which goes against the principles of agility. However, there is an alternative approach that can reconcile the two: including product discovery within the product development lifecycle.

The Challenge of Product Discovery in Agile

In agile practices, the emphasis is on iterative development and delivering value to customers quickly. This approach stands in contrast to the traditional product discovery process, which tends to prioritize exhaustive validation and documentation before any building begins. This creates a potential conflict between the two methodologies.

This dissonance is even more pronounced in startups, where time and resources are limited, and results are crucial. That is why most startups adopt the Agile approach. However, when it comes to Products, there are significant challenges in implementing Product Discovery frameworks because of the allocation of resources and time constraints.

If you spend too much time seeking extensive validation before starting the building process, you may end up wasting valuable time and resources that could be better utilized in actually building your product. This doesn’t imply that you should start building without a plan but rather emphasizes the need for a flexible roadmap that can adapt to new information gathered during the building and validation of your hypotheses. By following this approach, you will gradually move closer to achieving product-market fit until your MVP is ready for testing.

A Different Approach: Integrating Product Discovery in Agile

To address the challenge of integrating product discovery in an agile environment, a shift in mindset is required. Instead of treating product discovery as a separate phase that happens before development, it should be seen as an ongoing activity that is integrated into the entire product development lifecycle.

By allocating time and resources to experiments and validation throughout the development process, teams can gain valuable insights and validate their assumptions as they build. This approach allows for continuous learning and adaptation, aligning with the principles of agility.

Of course, you’ll need to manage the risks associated with conducting experiments. To do so, it is important to control the blast ratio of these experiments. This includes controlling the scope of the experiment and ensuring that its size and expected results will not harm its surroundings.

Another important element of this approach is failure management. The way you choose to handle failures will have a significant impact on the innovation your teams can drive, their motivation, and the speed at which you progress towards your goals. It is crucial to learn from each failure, understand why it occurred, prevent the repetition of the same mistakes, and develop solutions. This process should occur in short cycles, with shorter cycles being preferable. Lengthy cycles result in a larger amount of content to process, which can become tiresome.

The Benefits of Agile Product Discovery

Integrating product discovery within the agile framework offers several advantages. First, it enables teams to gather real-world feedback early on, reducing the risk of building a product that does not meet customer needs. Second, it promotes a collaborative mindset, as the entire team is involved in the discovery process. This fosters a shared understanding of customer needs and goals.

Furthermore, by conducting experiments and validation during development, teams can make informed decisions and pivot if necessary. This flexibility enables them to adapt to changing market conditions and customer feedback more effectively.

Conclusion

While traditional product discovery methods may seem incompatible with agile practices, there is a way to integrate the two approaches successfully. By including product discovery within the product development lifecycle and allocating time and resources to experiments and validation, teams can gain valuable insights and drive closer to their goals as they build, embracing the agile way.