Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value - Teresa Torres

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

Chapter Eight: Supercharged Ideation

Creative teams know that quantity is the best predictor of quality.”
— Leigh Thompson, Making the Team

You’ve identified a clear customer need, pain point, or desire—your target opportunity—and it’s finally time to jump into the solution space

Where do you start? For many, the answer is brainstorming. Now, odds are you just had one of two reactions when you read that

At some companies, brainstorming is defined as the be-all-end-all, the panacea from which all good ideas emerge. For others, it’s the epitome of a Dilbert comic—a complete waste of everyone’s time

What’s going on here? Why is brainstorming so polarizing? Does it work? Why or why not?

Quantity Leads to Quality

creativity research tells us that our first idea is rarely our best idea.

Most product teams are inundated with too many ideas

The problem, however, is that many of these ideas are first ideas to a variety of customer opportunities.

If we took the time to map each item in our backlog

odds are we’ll have only one or two solutions for each opportunity

for the strategic opportunities where you want to differentiate from your competitors, you’ll want to take the time to generate several ideas to ensure that you uncover the best ones

The Problem With Brainstorming

Brainstorming was introduced and popularized by Alex Osborn, an executive at a respected advertising firm, in his 1953 book Applied Imagination. He believed brainstorming was the lynchpin underlying creativity and wanted to share his company’s process with the world

To help put this book into context, it’s similar to what we see today with Ed Catmull’s book Creativity, Inc. about Pixar’s creative process or Tom Kelley’s The Art of Innovation about how the leading design firm IDEO works. Like Pixar and IDEO today, people admired Osborn’s creative success, and brainstorming spread quickly.

Osborn outlined four rules for brainstorming. One, focus on quantity. In other words, generate as many ideas as you can. Two, defer judgment, and separate idea generation from idea evaluation. Three, welcome unusual ideas. And four, combine and improve ideas. He suggested that groups come together real-time, face-to-face

Study after study found that the individuals generating ideas alone outperformed the brainstorming groups. Individuals generated more ideas, more diverse ideas, and more original ideas

they identified four mitigating factors. First, research has found that people tend to work harder when working individually than when working in groups. This is called social loafing.

Second, brainstorming groups exhibited many of the common challenges associated with group conformity. The early ideas set the tone for later ideas

Third, brainstorming groups ran into challenges with production blocking

about to say something when someone else jumped in, prompting you to forget what you were going to say

the fourth factor is a common group trait known as downward norm setting—the performance of the group tends to be limited to the lowest-performing member. Rather than the strongest member raising everyone else up, the opposite happens.

brainstorming groups are subject to what they call “the illusion of group productivity.”40 This is a phenomenon in which groups overestimate their performance. They also report high levels of satisfaction with their work despite their lesser performance

since the brainstorming groups spent less time stuck, their perception was that their performance was higher. This illusion of group productivity may explain why so many brainstorming advocates consider it a panacea

if you are wondering if there is a way to get the benefit of reducing cognitive failures that we see in groups with the creative output of individuals brainstorming on their own, it turns out there is

alternating between individual ideation and group sharing of ideas can improve the quality of ideas generated in subsequent individual ideation sessions.41 Exposure to other people’s ideas did inspire new ideas

Participants started by ideating on their own. Then they shared their ideas with the group. Then they went back to ideating on their own. They never ideated as a group, but they received the benefit of hearing each other’s ideas

Getting Unstuck

Creativity is a universal human trait. And as a product-team member, there is no one better than you to generate creative solutions to your customers’ problems

First, don’t try to spend an hour generating ideas. Take frequent breaks. Spread it out throughout your day. Try to generate ideas in the few minutes you have between meetings. After lunch, go for a walk, and daydream about what you might build

take advantage of incubation

After a good night’s sleep, you come to work, returning to the problem. Instantly, you identify a solution

Incubation can be particularly helpful after hearing other people’s ideas. You may not think of new ideas right away, but odds are, your brain is still working on it in the background.

look to analogous products for inspiration. For many product teams, this means competitive research

look broader than that. Many innovative ideas come from unrelated domains

What other industries have solved similar problems? They don’t need to be similar or even be in an adjacent industry

you can start to consider what your extreme users might need. What would a power user want? What does the first-time user need? What about people with different disabilities? How about people who live in remote locations or bustling cities? Young people? Senior citizens?

don’t be afraid to consider wild ideas. Some people don’t like this suggestion, because wild ideas are rarely pursued. But wild ideas can improve more feasible ideas.

Putting It All Into Practice

1. Review your target opportunity

2. Generate ideas alone.

3. Share ideas across your team

4. Repeat steps 2 and 3.

until you’ve generated between 15 and 20 ideas for your target opportunity.

Evaluating Your Ideas

Once you’ve generated 15 to 20 ideas for the same target opportunity, it’s time to start evaluating your ideas

Chapter Ten: Testing Assumptions, Not Ideas

Each answer a team collects—positive or negative—is a unit of progress”
— Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, Sense & Respond

Armed with your “leap of faith” assumptions for three ideas, you might be tempted to rush into assumption testing. It’s exhilarating to get an experiment live and start collecting data.

Sometimes teams get so excited about testing assumptions that they come to their session during the identifying-assumptions week and report that they’ve already started collecting data on some of their top assumptions. I admire these teams’ bias toward action. But more often than not, we find problems with their assumption tests. Sometimes their tests aren’t designed to test their “leap of faith” assumption but instead are designed to test the whole idea.

Sometimes the team hasn’t agreed on what success looks like upfront, and they aren’t sure how to interpret their results. Sometimes they test with the wrong audience, or they get distracted by interesting, but not meaningful, data.