Continuous discovery means continuous learning

Most product teams realize they need to learn about customers and their problems. They may not all realize (yet) the benefits of spreading that discovery throughout the entire process of building their product. Continuous discovery provides a way for your team to learn about your customer and their problems on an ongoing basis so you can acquire the information that you need, when you need it.

Meanwhile, in product news, we’re talking about an Apple monopoly, AI spam, and new products that help you map customer journeys and hum that tune.

What is Continuous Discovery? The folks at the IxDF - The Interaction Design Foundation describe continuous discovery as an approach to user research used in agile teams where research is conducted as small, frequent activities throughout the product development lifecycle. This infuses customer feedback into all product decisions instead of focusing on onetime research activity at the beginning of a project.

Continuous discovery – holy grail, or poisoned chalice? Continuous discovery sounds brilliant in theory. How can speaking to users on a weekly basis possibly not be a good thing for Agile teams to do? However, in practice, continuous discovery can cause teams more harm than good if they don’t approach it in the right way. Neil Turner explains what continuous discovery is, what some of the common pitfalls are, and how teams can avoid them.

How teams do continuous discovery research today, according to research. Recent research conducted by User Interviews internal UX research team revealed the rising popularity of the continuous discovery approach to doing UX research, the folks at User Interviews wanted to learn more. Lizzy Burnam ?? shared how User Interviews conducted the research about continuous discovery and the key insights they drew from it.

From Ideas to Breakthroughs: How Continuous Discovery Powers Digital Healthcare Innovation. Digital healthcare products have been notorious for their suboptimal UX owing to their complexity, the demands of industry standards, cascading dependencies, the expected resistance to change, and HIPPA. Renuka Savant describes how healthcare product leaders can embrace a continuous discovery process and infuse it into their product strategy.

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This week’s Video

Becoming a Successful Continuous Discovery Team. More teams are moving toward a truly cross-functional product team model where the teams that develop the product (i.e. product manager, designers, software engineers) are the ones responsible for doing their own discovery. They do their own user research, conduct their own experiments, and synthesize what they are learning week-over-week to support their daily product decisions. In this talk from INDUSTRY: The Product Conference, Teresa Torres , Product Discovery Coach at Product Talk introduces continuous discovery and explains why it can be useful and how you can put it into practice.

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Product Management News: Week of March 25, 2024

According to the DOJ, building your own platform makes you a monopoly. The U.S. Department of Justice announced it filed a lawsuit accusing Apple of behaving like a monopoly in locking in iPhone customers and limiting competitors building hardware and software. The lawsuit is a wide-ranging and complicated affair, and TechCrunch covered the ins and outs of the DOJ’s case, the industry’s response and all the ongoing implications for companies and customers.

I’ll have the Spam, Spam, AI, and Spam. TechCrunch found the GPT Store, OpenAI’s official marketplace for GPTs, is flooded with bizarre, potentially copyright-infringing GPTs that imply a light touch where it concerns OpenAI’s moderation efforts. On example is a GPT that promises to generate art in the style of Disney and Marvel properties, but serves as little more than a funnel to third-party paid services, and advertise themselves as being able to bypass AI content detection tools such as Turnitin and Copyleaks.

It’s not the destination, it’s the (customer) journey. SaaS journey management platform TheyDo lets everyone on your team collaborate to map customer journeys. You can use it to map user journeys, OKRs, and customer journeys to bring insights and data together. When your team can collaborate to map a journey, you make it that much easier for everyone to build a shared understanding of how customers experience your product.

YouTube can name that tune in three hums. YouTube Music has rolled out song search - a feature which lets you search for a song by playing, singing, or humming a few bars. The true benefit of this product is when you’re playing an ultra competitive round of music bingo and can’t quite place that Taylor Swift song.

Resources and news curated by Kent J McDonald