(Business viability risk) And its not enough that its just the product managers opinion on these questions. We need to collect evidence. When it comes to how we do product discovery, there are a set of core principles that drive how we work. If you understand these, you will understand not only how to work well today but also how to easily incorporate new techniques as they emerge in the future. 165 166 1. We know we cant count on our customers (or our executives or stakeholders) to tell us what to build. Customers dont know whats possible, and with technology products, none of us know what we really want until we actually see it. Its not that customers or our executives are necessarily wrong; its just that its our job to make sure the solution we deliver solves the underlying problem. This is probably the most fundamental principle in all of modern product. Historically, in the vast majority of innovations in our industry, the customers had no idea that

This is only becoming truer with time. Customers dont know whats possible, and with technology products, none of us know what we really want until we actually see it. 2. The most important thing is to establish compelling value. Its all hard, but the hardest part of all is creating the necessary value so that customers ultimately choose to buy or to use. We can survive for a while with usability issues or performance issues, but without the core value, we really have nothing. As a result, this is generally where well need to spend most of our discovery time. 3. As hard and important as the engineering is, coming up with a good user experience is usually even harder, and more critical to success. While every product team has engineers, not every team has the necessary product design skills, and even when they do, are they being used the way we need to use them? 4. Functionality, design, and technology are inherently intertwined. In the old wat

Today, we know that the technology drives (and enables) the functionality as much as the other way around. We know that technology drives (and enables) design. We know that design Principles of Product Discovery 167 drives (and enables) functionality. You dont have to look further than your own phone to see numerous examples of both. The point is that all three of these are completely intertwined. This is the single biggest reason we push so hard for the product manager, product designer, and tech lead to sit physically adjacent to each other. 5. We expect that many of our ideas wont work out, and the ones that do will require several iterations. The most important thing is to know what you cant know. To quote Marc Andreessen, The most important thing is to know what you cant know, and we cant know in advance which of our ideas will work with customers and wh

So, we approach discovery with the mindset that many, if not most, of our ideas wont work out. The most common reason for this is value, but sometimes the design is too complicated, and sometimes it would take far too long to build, and sometimes there turn out to be legal or privacy issues. The point is we need to be open to solving the underlying problem in