Rethinking Product Development: From Waterfall to Continuous Discovery and Delivery

Introduction

In today's fast-paced tech industry, many companies claim to follow agile methodologies, yet their product development processes more closely resemble waterfall approaches. This disconnect leads to inefficiencies, missed opportunities, and products that fail to meet user needs. Let's explore the root causes of these issues and discuss a more effective approach: continuous discovery and delivery.

The Current Product Development Cycle: A Waterfall in Agile Clothing

The Source of Ideas

One of the primary issues in many organizations is the source of product ideas. Often, these ideas come from high-level management or executives who are disconnected from the day-to-day realities of the product and its users. While their input is valuable, it shouldn't be the primary driver of product development.

Surprisingly, customers are also not the best source of product ideas. As Henry Ford famously said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Customers face two significant limitations:

1. They don't know what's technologically possible.

2. They often don't know what they want until they see it.

Instead, the most valuable source of ideas is often overlooked: the team itself (design, product, and engineering). These are the people who work with the technology every day and understand both its capabilities and limitations. They are best positioned to match user pain points with technological solutions. The biggest source of ideas should come from your team's discovery habits.

The Business Case Fallacy

Many organizations require detailed business cases before green-lighting a project. However, this approach is fundamentally flawed. It's impossible to accurately predict the value, impact, or effort required for a product or feature before it's implemented. The success of a solution depends on its quality, which can't be known in advance.

You won't know the value, the impact, and the effort it takes until after the implementation because it depends on how good your solution is. And since you don't have the solution yet, how can you know how good it is? You can alter the data or come up with scenarios to support your theory, but you won't know until after the implementation.

The Problem with Product Roadmaps

Traditional product roadmaps are another stumbling block. Marty Cagan argues that at least half of the ideas on a typical roadmap won't work as intended. For those that do show promise, it often takes multiple iterations (typically 3-5) before they provide significant value to the customers or the business.

Roadmaps create a false sense of certainty in an inherently uncertain process. They focus on output (features shipped) rather than outcomes (value created for users and the business). We don't know what we don't know, and the value that comes out of a certain feature and the effort it takes to do it is unknown.

A startup usually runs out of money before the validation, and in a larger company, they run out of management patience with one shot at something. The hard truth is: it's not going to work on the first try and will take several iterations to do so and that's the beauty of a product, the iterations.

The Significance of Design: Beyond Mere Window Dressing

Design is often regarded as a secondary consideration. Designers frequently receive wireframes from product managers and are tasked with making them visually appealing, which can be seen as merely window dressing for an already-decided product.

This is a waste of design talent and a missed opportunity for innovation. Designers should be involved from the beginning of the product development process, working collaboratively with product managers and engineers to shape the product.

When product managers create wireframes, they're essentially doing interaction design – a job they're often not trained for. This approach undermines the value of having an in-house UX team and can lead to suboptimal user experiences. It's not fun being a designer in a waterfall environment since you're already starting to work on something where a lot of bad decisions have already been made.

Imagine you are a designer and your product manager is giving you wireframes; at this point, you are more of a visual designer. As a product manager, you are not an interaction designer! This is not why we hire our UX Team, and if this is the way your company is working, then you might as well save the money and hire a visual design agency. The reason we do design in-house is to avoid this way of working.

A Better Way: Continuous Discovery and Delivery

So, what's the alternative? The most successful product teams practice continuous discovery and delivery. Here's how it works:

1. Ideas and Vision: Start with a clear vision and set of objectives (OKRs), not detailed roadmaps.

2. Discovery: Product managers, designers, and engineers work collaboratively to explore and validate ideas. This is where MVP (Minimum Viable Product) tests come in. The goal is to try many more ideas than you'll eventually ship – perhaps 500 ideas explored for every 100 delivered.

3. Delivery: Once an idea has been validated through discovery, move it into delivery. This is where you work towards product-market fit.

This approach allows for rapid iteration and learning. The best teams might run 10-20 iterations per week during the discovery phase.

Lean startups are all about finding the fastest and cheapest way to validate ideas. Discovery is when product managers, designers, and engineers work together collaboratively. This is where MVP tests fall in.

The Five Key Risks

For any product or feature, there are five key risks to consider:

1. Value: Will they buy it/choose to use it?

2. Usability: Can users figure out how to use it?

3. Feasibility: Can we build it and can our stakeholders support it?

4. Business Viability: Does this solution work for our business?

5. Ethics: Should we build it? Is it ethical and aligned with our values?

By focusing on these risks during the discovery phase, teams can avoid wasting time and resources on ideas that aren't viable, usable, feasible, or ethical. If what we do is not valuable, then it's not useful to anybody.

The Importance of Team Culture

The success of continuous discovery and delivery depends heavily on the culture of your product team. As John Doerr, the venture capitalist, emphasizes, "We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries."

Missionaries are passionate about the product and its impact on users. They're invested in creating value, not just completing assigned tasks. This mindset is crucial for the kind of collaborative, innovative work required in modern product development.

Conclusion

The path to better product development isn't through more detailed planning or stricter processes. It's through embracing uncertainty, fostering collaboration between product, design, and engineering, and continuously learning through rapid experimentation.

By shifting from output-focused roadmaps to outcome-focused discovery and delivery, teams can create products that truly meet user needs, drive business success, and maintain ethical standards. It's time to empower our teams to become true product innovators.

Remember, as Jeff Bezos said, "Be stubborn on the vision, but flexible on the details." In product development, the roadmap is in the details – and flexibility there is key to success. By cultivating a team of "missionaries" who are passionate about solving real problems, you set the stage for innovative, user-centric products that make a real difference.

The current approach often results in implementing features that users couldn't care less about. We are focused on output, not outcome, and user validation is done at a later stage, which results in wasted opportunities. Instead, we need to start doing continuous product discovery and delivery, trying many more ideas, and using OKRs with visions, not roadmaps.

Best teams do 10-20 iterations per week, focusing on what's valuable, usable, feasible, and ethical. This approach allows for faster learning, better products, and ultimately, greater success in the ever-changing world of technology and user needs.