Tag: Discovering Opportunities

What do your customers care about? This seems like a simple enough question, but many product teams struggle to answer it honestly.

Often the first instinct is to frame an answer in terms of what your business cares about. But remember: Your customers don’t care about your business outcomes. They care about having their own problems solved or having an enjoyable experience when they use your product.

Remember: Your customers don’t care about your business outcomes. They care about having their own problems solved or having an enjoyable experience when they use your product. – Tweet This

Today’s Product in Practice is a great reminder of this. One of the product teams at Grailed, a peer-to-peer marketplace for fashion, put a ton of time and resources into building a feed. But instead of launching with great fanfare and adoption, the response was underwhelming.

When the product team took a step back to evaluate what could be better, they realized they could benefit from introducing continuous discovery habits.

Talking to customers regularly allowed them to better frame opportunities in terms their customers actually used. With a better handle on opportunities, it was easier to identify and test assumptions. And the whole process of visualizing their thinking made their work much more enjoyable.

But that’s not all—introducing continuous discovery habits completely transformed their customers’ behavior for the better. And this ultimately had the impact on the business outcomes they cared about most.

Read on to learn about how opportunity mapping led to a major product transformation at Grailed.

Do you have your own Product in Practice story you’d like to share with us? You can submit your story here.

Meet the Continuous Discovery Champions, Rajiv Chopra and DJ Mitchell

Rajiv Chopra is the Group Product Manager and DJ Mitchell is the Staff iOS Engineer on the Discovery team at Grailed. As you’ll see in this blog post, Rajiv and DJ are committed to the values of continuous discovery. But in the context of their company, which is a peer-to-peer marketplace for fashion, “Discovery” refers to helping people discover their style and clothes that could help them express themselves.

Rajiv says, “The real user problem we’re aimed at solving is: ‘I don’t really know what I’m looking for and I need some help—can you help me get inspired and figure it out?’” A small percentage of users—around 10%—arrive at Grailed because they’re looking for a very specific item and it popped up in a search result. But Rajiv says his team is focused on helping the 90% of people who don’t know what they’re looking for to figure it out.

Describing his role, DJ explains that being a staff engineer gives him a lot of latitude to have an impact (and a lot of leeway to define exactly what that means). He sees his role as bringing engineering closer to product, modeling certain types of behavior, and mentoring engineers to be more product minded and outcome oriented.

Before: Claiming to Do Discovery But Struggling to Make an Impact

Rajiv and DJ say that before they introduced the opportunity solution tree and committed to the practice of continuous discovery, their team was struggling with a few common challenges. Rajiv explains, “The PM and leadership would define an outcome based on what we ‘felt’ was important, but it wasn’t really motivated by what we knew or any learnings. And then immediately we’d go into ideating solutions, prioritizing solutions, and then delivering them at full fidelity.”

The Discovery team’s initial approach to building the feed helps illustrate some of these issues. Grailed has both a mobile app and a website, but the mobile app is where they get the majority of their traffic and engagement, so that’s where the team was focused. The original concept of the feed allowed users to curate their experience. Similar to other types of social platforms, users could follow designers or sellers and then browse through content in their feed.

The original premise of this feed, according to Rajiv was: “You set it up, you manage it, curate it, and you allow your feed to represent your style.” The way the Discovery team originally delivered this project was an eight-month investment of building the infrastructure, doing the design work, and building the supporting foundational elements. But when the team got to the end of the eight months, the response was underwhelming. While they didn’t harm the business, they essentially broke even.

This was not the impact they’d been hoping to have, so it prompted Rajiv and DJ to reconsider their approach to product discovery. Around this time, they read Continuous Discovery Habits, which got them thinking about how to apply these concepts at Grailed.

Introducing the Opportunity Solution Tree Leads to Rethinking the Feed

One of the first steps the Discovery team took was to visualize everything that was in their heads through a first draft of an opportunity solution tree. DJ explains, “Our first crack was to do an ideation with the team, just to get everything we think we know. That generated the original version of the opportunity solution tree.” From there, they started talking to users to verify that things were actually true.

Trying to describe this messy process, Rajiv says, “It was basically get everybody together, just dump it out, go through a structuring/affinity mapping/clustering activity, and use that as opportunity solution tree number one.” In that first version, they just had “increase relevance” in the tree.

Since then, their opportunity solution tree has evolved quite a bit. Now the place where the feed lives in the tree is: “I want to browse without any specific idea of what I’m looking for.” Rajiv says, “We want the feed to help accomplish this. That’s the problem this is ultimately trying to solve, and the way that it’s going to do that is helping you browse things that you like that are in your style.”

Describing the evolution of their thinking and the way they framed opportunities, Rajiv explains, “The challenges we were having with the feed were primarily of content quality, which is, ‘I just wish the feed would show me more stuff I like and less stuff that I don’t.’”

And while this might seem obvious, they realized that for several months they were actually solving for the problem, “I wish I could better control what my feed showed me.” At the time, the Discovery team assumed users would curate and manage their own feeds.

But, says Rajiv, “We learned when we talked to users that nobody’s saying this. They don’t say these words. Most people are saying, ‘Show me more stuff I like and less stuff I don’t.’ They’re used to feeds being algorithmic. They’re not thinking about them as, ‘Oh, I need to go and press all these buttons for it to work.’”

We were trying to solve, ‘I wish I could better control what my feed showed me.’ But when we talked to users we learned that nobody’s saying this. They don’t say these words. – Tweet This

DJ compares this evolution to chronological feed debate that’s been happening on every social media platform for the past ten years. “A few people think you want exact perfect control to see everything, but actually the quality of chronological feeds at scale is kind of bad and that’s why no one has them. That’s the same challenge we ran into.”

Looking back on this process, Rajiv says, “We’ve taken a chronological snapshot of our opportunity solution tree over time and you can see how much depth and how certain things get removed and added.” Once they started talking to users about their feeds, they began to pull out opportunities like: “Show me things I interact with” or “Show me stuff that’s popular,” or “There should always be new stuff when I come,” or “I want to get inspired when I come—show me some stuff I don’t already know about.”

As the Discovery team at Grailed has become more comfortable with continuous discovery, their opportunity solution tree has evolved to be much more complex. Click the image to see a larger version.

The Discovery team started taking these statements and identifying very low-lift ways they could start testing. If users claimed they wanted stuff that was popular, for example, they’d figure out an easy way to introduce that into their feed. “Over the course of six months, the feed went from this very simple, reverse chron feed of everything to a feed that has different parameters, different recommendations, weaves things in an intelligent way, and manages stuff you’ve seen before to make sure that it maintains freshness,” says Rajiv.

A Closer Look at the Transformation of the Opportunity Solution Tree

How did the opportunity solution tree evolve to better guide the transformation of the feed? Rajiv and DJ note that the process of mapping opportunities on the opportunity solution tree involved multiple steps and iterations. It takes time to get it right. “Your understanding of the opportunity space is a slow-moving but constantly growing activity,” says Rajiv. Here are some of their other major observations about the evolution of their opportunity solution tree.

Your understanding of the opportunity space is a slow-moving but constantly growing activity. – Tweet This

“Your understanding of the opportunity space grows and evolves over time,” says Rajiv. “We ended up finding that our initial statements were business statements; they weren’t user opportunities. The most valuable thing is ensuring that our opportunities are representative of words that our customers use. There’s nothing more than just talking to customers to find those opportunities.”

In addition to learning to frame opportunities in the language their customers actually use, Rajiv says they’ve gotten much more specific in their opportunity statements. Before, their opportunities would be framed as, “I want to get inspired and discover without any specific idea of what I’m looking for,” which was such a huge solution space that they had a lot of trouble ideating productively and actually knowing what they were solving for. “Now we’re ideating around a really specific problem, like ‘there should always be new stuff when I come’ or ‘show me stuff that’s popular,’ which has allowed us to get really targeted solutions that directly address the specific problems that people have.”

One other observation Rajiv makes is that the lower you are on the tree, the faster you can be and the higher you are, the more evidence you should be building over time. “And one of the things the opportunity solution tree allows you to do—both by going deep and laddering it back up—is to show that you’re slowly building this lattice of understanding of this problem space.”

One of the things the opportunity solution tree allows you to do—both by going deep and laddering it back up—is to show that you’re slowly building this lattice of understanding of the problem space. – Tweet This

You won’t be able to tell whether a high-level opportunity is important to the business in a week. But within 3 months, you can test your way through 20 opportunities and be in a much better position to say yes, there is strong evidence for it, no, there’s strong evidence against it, or the evidence is mixed and you may need to reevaluate your structure of the problem space. “The way we build this evidence is cumulative—it’s not a zero to one in a week,” says Rajiv.

A Total 180 in Impact: Driving Positive Reception from Users and Real Business Results

There’s no doubt that adopting continuous discovery habits—specifically conducting regular customer interviews and mapping opportunities on the opportunity solution tree—has led to impressive results at Grailed. “It’s had a total 180 in impact, both in terms of business impact and the reception from our users,” says Rajiv.

The two key metrics they cared about were how many items were being discovered from the feed they’ve built and how many dollars of gross merchandise volume (GMV) that was driving for their business.

“Discovery and GMV have grown four to five times from the feed specifically (from January to August),” says Rajiv. “In terms of the impact that it’s having on the business, it’s clearly having a big impact, both in engagement and revenue.”

The new feed has had a major impact on both how many new items users are discovering and the dollars of gross merchandising volume—two metrics that matter a lot at Grailed.

The Discovery team also wanted to measure the impact of the new feed on lifetime value (LTV) and whether users were changing their behavior in a permanent way. They compared users who made their first purchase through the home feed vs. users who made their first purchase through search. “The feed shows clear evidence that it drives higher LTV, and specifically the way that it does that is it drives higher levels of retention and engagement,” says Rajiv. “When we look at these people who activate through the feed, they come back and open the app about 30% more than the average user, they discover about 40% more than the average user. And the impact that it’s having is to the order of 20% on LTV and specifically by driving higher levels of retention, which is a good proxy that we use for real, true user value.”

The new feed has also had a significant impact on user retention and cumulative lifetime value (LTV). Click the image to see a larger version.

The Discovery team is also getting qualitative evidence that the users’ entire perception of the product is changing. Rajiv says, “There were a lot of instances where we wouldn’t even bring up the feed and users would unprompted come to us and say, ‘I gotta tell you. This feed is awesome.’”

This was a major change, Rajiv adds, “I can’t remember the last time at Grailed that we released a feature and without even bringing it up users would come to us and be like, ‘Wow, I’m so stoked that you built that.’ Normally we have to remind them, like, ‘Hey we just released this thing. Do you like it? Did you even notice?’” While the LTV and engagement data provide strong evidence, “It was cool to hear users articulate that same story,” says Rajiv.

Learnings and Key Takeaways

Looking back on their continuous discovery journey so far, DJ and Rajiv have a few key learnings and takeaways to share with other product teams.

• Read Continuous Discovery Habits!

Reading the Continuous Discovery Habits book is what kick-started this entire journey for the Discovery team at Grailed. It made such a big impression that they started a book club to encourage others to read it and discuss how to apply the concepts on their teams.

• Map your assumptions and avoid the temptation to jump straight into solutions

“Assumption mapping is also a really valuable tool,” says DJ. “It’s easy to lull yourself into the idea that you don’t need to do any of this stuff and it might seem like extra work when you get it right, but very often you don’t get it right the first time.” DJ emphasizes the importance of following the steps of the opportunity solution tree and not skipping straight to solutions.

It’s easy to lull yourself into the idea that you don’t need to do any of this stuff and it might seem like extra work when you get it right, but very often you don’t get it right the first time. – Tweet This

• Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

“You see that in the artifacts of the early opportunity solution trees and how they’ve evolved,” says DJ. It’s really easy to feel confused and feel stuck. Set a time limit for yourself and just keep making progress. But when that fails, move on to the next tip, which is…

• When in doubt, do it together

“We used to err more on the side of documentation and now we do things much more in person,” explains DJ. “We’ve found it really effective to just do things in person, talk about it, and figure it out together rather than going into a hole and trying to do it all by yourself.”

• Draw more, talk more, write less

Similarly, drawing (or at least creating a visual representation of ideas) has become the go-to way of communicating at Grailed. “It’s way easier to have a little bit of text and a diagram, a structured visual thing that will explain your thinking. It’s a huge time-saver, but it’s also so much better for clearly expressing what your intention is. It’s a very underrated hack that I’m a diehard believer in now,” says DJ. To facilitate this, they have a section of their InVision board called “scratchpad” where everyone gets a dedicated “visualization corner.”

Drawing is so much better for clearly expressing what your intention is. It’s a very underrated hack that I’m a diehard believer in now. – Tweet This

The members of the Grailed Discovery team are now die-hard believers in visualizing their thinking, as evidenced by the scratchpads everyone keeps on their InVision board. Click the image to see a larger version.

• Your job is to facilitate; not give orders

“I feel like PMs have this existential dread that we’re constantly responsible and accountable for our roadmap,” says Rajiv. “The more you don’t involve your team, the more that gets reinforced. The better I’m doing my job, the less I’m responsible for coming up with ideas and the more I’m responsible for helping the team figure out and discern which ideas to bubble up or dig further into.” By emphasizing facilitation over giving orders, “The quality and quantity of our ideas has gotten much higher. And my emotional wellbeing is so much better than it used to be. Aside from facilitation delivering better outcomes, it makes your job fun and awesome and exciting as opposed to dreadful and oppressive.”

Looking to connect with others who are in the process of introducing continuous discovery habits on their teams? Come join us in the Continuous Discovery Habits community!

The post Product in Practice: Opportunity Mapping Led to a 20% Lift in LTV at Grailed appeared first on Product Talk.

Hi there, Product Talk readers! We can’t wait to share our latest Product in Practice with you. For this story, we spoke with a product team leading the Digital Hotels vertical at Seera Group, a travel and tourism company based in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). The team shares how they defined a new outcome and mapped out the opportunity space when COVID-19 ground international travel to a halt in 2020 and they were forced to discover a new market. Hope Gurion coached the Seera team using Product Talk’s Continuous Discovery Habits curriculum.

Want to check out the other posts in this series? You can find them here.

The words “travel” and “2020” don’t feel like they belong in the same sentence. Unless, of course, that sentence is, “I had to cancel all my travel plans in 2020.”

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, beginning in March 2020, many countries closed their borders and some even imposed hefty restrictions on domestic travel.

So you can imagine that a company like Seera and a team like Ahmed Guijou’s—which is focused on helping customers book hotel accommodations—would be facing a major crisis.

How could they adapt to a massive, sudden, and unforeseen obstacle? How could they quickly discover a new market?

We caught up with Ahmed Guijou, Product Director, Ahmed Abdallah, Front End Technical Lead, Eslam Tawakol, UX Designer, Senthil Kumar PG, Product Manager, and Walid Aktouf, UX Lead from the Digital Hotels vertical within Seera to learn more about their story.

Meet the Seera Hotels product team. Clockwise from top left Ahmed Guijou, Walid Aktouf, Ahmed Abdallah, Eslam Tawakol, and Senthil Kumar PG.

The Challenge: International Travel Instantly Disappears

Before COVID-19, Ahmed Guijou described his team’s purpose as “helping customers book their dream vacation or business trip accommodations in the easiest way possible while helping the company establish itself as a market leader in the region.” The Digital Hotels vertical was an ecommerce platform where Middle Eastern customers could book their business or leisure accommodation locally or internationally. This might include places like hotels, aparthotels, resorts, apartments, or chalets.

But all that changed in the spring of 2020 when Saudi Arabia closed its international borders. “This had a direct impact on our hotel bookings as our primary customers were confined to make domestic bookings,” says Ahmed. “The pandemic also created a fear of meeting people in public places, particularly hotels.”

With the sudden elimination of international travel, Ahmed and his team saw a shift in demand from hotels to alternative accommodations like apartments, chalets, or istiharas. Istihara means “resting place” in Arabic and it’s generally a large property with an outdoor area, barbecue, and a pool.

“From previous rounds of research, we were aware of a culture in Saudi of renting properties on a single-day basis in the same city where they reside,” explains Ahmed. “The purpose of these bookings is to have a large space with an outdoor area and pool to socialize with friends and family, almost like a mini retreat.”

Since the circumstances required focusing almost entirely on domestic sales, Ahmed says, “We had more clarity on supply and demand by city or area in Saudi Arabia. This led us to discover that our supply of alternative accommodations in certain cities was low or nonexistent—particularly in cities that don’t have many hotels, such as Abha and Taif.”

Next, the sourcing team carried out research to identify various means to secure alternative accommodations. They performed market research, which led them to identify a gap in the market.

Mapping out the Opportunity Space to Create a Path Forward

Once the team had narrowed in on a gap in the market, they used opportunity solution trees to map out the opportunity space.

Walid Aktouf explains the process: “We knew upfront that since this is a marketplace, the opportunity space contains two types of customers: guests and hosts. Based on this we needed to create two separate trees, as each customer had different journeys and goals.”

With a marketplace model, the opportunity space contains two types of customers: guests and hosts. This means we needed to create two separate trees, as each customer had different journeys and goals. – Tweet This

Here’s an example of the opportunity solution tree the Seera team used for guests. Note that details have been blurred out from all images to protect Seera’s intellectual property.

The Seera team created two opportunity solution trees. This one maps the experience of hosts on their platform.

Walid says that in the early stages of interviewing customers and collecting insights, they added opportunities haphazardly to each tree. “Our thinking was it was too soon to start grouping as no immediate patterns or trends have emerged.”

After conducting at least five interviews with each customer type, the product team started creating parent opportunities based on their perception of the problems. Walid explains, “At this point, the parent groups were simply labels like Content, Payment, Trust, and Miscellaneous and not higher level opportunities.”

The more interviews the team conducted, the easier it was to identify clear overarching opportunities. Walid says, “As a result, we reframed the parent labels into actual opportunities and reshuffled our tree. We narrowed it down to five high-level opportunities, like ‘I wish to have a smooth transaction,’ with multiple child levels like ‘I want hassle-free payment’ and ‘I wish I could pay on arrival.’ As you go down the tree, the opportunities become more specific.”

When we started mapping opportunities, our parent groups were simply labels. As we conducted more interviews, we reframed the parent labels and reshuffled the tree. – Tweet This

Walid shares some of the opportunities his team landed on after conducting several rounds of interviews with guests and hosts.

Synthesizing Learning with Visual Representation

One of the major benefits of using the opportunity solution tree? Walid says, “The tree served as a visual representation of all the insights and opportunities we were collecting from customers. This allowed us to organize learnings by hierarchy, by theme, or by size—for example, how frequently customers mentioned something.”

The opportunity solution tree served as a visual representation of all the insights and opportunities we were collecting from customers. – Tweet This

This zoomed out Miro board shows the various ways the Seera team used visual artifacts like the opportunity solution tree to track their progress and communicate with stakeholders.

Ahmed Abdallah says the tree evolved along with the team’s understanding of the opportunity space: “The trees served as a way for us to incrementally shape our understanding of guests and hosts. Our tree was almost a reflection of our understanding of the opportunity space—as our understanding grows or changes, so does the tree.”

Our opportunity solution tree was almost a reflection of our understanding of the opportunity space—as our understanding grows or changes, so does the tree. – Tweet This

The team also used color to highlight the more valuable opportunities which they planned to explore first. Walid explains that they kept track of how often customers mentioned specific opportunities. They then posed the question, “If we solve this opportunity, how big of an impact will it have on customers?”

Using the answer to that question, they would center subsequent interviews around these opportunities to get a clearer understanding of how they would affect the customers’ overall experience. “This helped us assess and size the opportunities with more confidence,” says Walid.

Ahmed Abdallah says the tree was especially helpful because it helped them better understand the differences between booking a traditional hotel and alternative accommodation like an istihara. “As we conducted more and more interviews, we noticed patterns in their journey that don’t apply to hotel customers. For example, when booking istirahas, customers don’t spend the night. They book it from afternoon to midnight and spend the day at the property socializing and having a good time with family and friends. Hotel customers, on the other hand, primarily need a clean and comfortable place to spend the night—not a place to socialize and have fun. This was one of the biggest contrasts we found, among many.”

Summing up the benefits of using the tree to map opportunities, Walid says, “The tree made it easy to record, absorb, and even share our findings. By using trees, we made sure we didn’t lose record of any opportunities.”

The tree made it easy to record, absorb, and even share our findings. By using trees, we made sure we didn’t lose record of any opportunities. – Tweet This

Using the Tree to Guide Their Next Steps

The product team continued using the opportunity solution tree to guide their next steps in the discovery process. Eslam Tawakol explains that after identifying the most promising opportunities based on customer interviews, “We reframed these key opportunities we identified into themes that served as criteria for our competitive analysis. We analyzed our competitors on their experience, journeys, and business model and mapped it all in a Miro board.” Using the information they gathered, they created a matrix to score competitors on a scale of 1 (poor solution) to 5 (excellent solution).

The Seera product team used opportunities to help them run competitive analysis. They created this matrix to score competitors on a scale of 1 to 5.

The team returns to the tree on an ongoing basis to help them prioritize. Senthil Kumar PG says, “Our tree helps us focus on the most impactful opportunities. Everything on the tree is up to date and based on learnings from actual discussions with customers. This ensures our decisions are both relevant and evidence-based.” Senthil says the product team considers the tree to be a sort of “dashboard” where they can find the most relevant information at a glance.

Everything on the tree is up to date and based on learnings from actual discussions with customers. This ensures our decisions are both relevant and evidence-based. – Tweet This

Plus, the tree keeps everyone grounded in the same data points and means decision-making is a team effort. Senthil says, “Making decisions based on our tree is collaborative—everyone has a voice. It’s the starting point for most team conversations, and it guarantees that our discussions and negotiations revolve around facts and evidence, not our own opinions.”

Making decisions based on our tree is collaborative—everyone has a voice. It also guarantees that our discussions and negotiations revolve around facts and evidence, not our own opinions. – Tweet This

As a visual tool, the opportunity solution tree doesn’t just help the product team at Seera—it’s also an ideal way to keep stakeholders in the loop. This did require some slight changes so stakeholders wouldn’t get bogged down in the details. Ahmed Guijou says, “We reframed high-level opportunities into themes or customer needs, in a way that our stakeholders can better relate to. They didn’t need to know every little detail, so we created a shortlist of the most impactful and eye-opening opportunities to share with our stakeholders.”

During weekly checkpoints with stakeholders and management, the team would share new insights and highlight any concerns or risky assumptions they hadn’t yet tested. “We didn’t need to prepare any slides or formally present our progress,” says Guijou. “Instead, we gave them walkthroughs directly on our Miro boards. This informal approach enabled us to have an open discussion where stakeholders could share their input at any time, as opposed to a one-way presentation. Our approach with stakeholders was: ‘Here are our findings. This was our approach. Here is our next move. What do you think?’”

The product team used their opportunity solution tree to keep track of assumptions and get input from stakeholders.

Reflecting on Their Challenges and Successes

As you might expect, the product team at Seera encountered a few obstacles and challenges when adopting opportunity solution trees and continuous discovery. Walid says recruiting hosts to interview was a hurdle initially and continues to be. “It gives us an early indication or warning that getting them to sign up to our platform will be even more challenging.”

Sizing opportunities was also challenging, Walid says, “As we were exploring a new product space, we didn’t have any existing data or numbers to help us size opportunities. However, the more we talked to customers, the more knowledge we gained. This gave us confidence that the opportunities we picked were the right ones.”

The more we talked to customers, the more knowledge we gained. This gave us confidence that the opportunities we picked were the right ones. – Tweet This

Walid cites the very nature of their project—understanding an entirely new product—as another challenge: “We were not trying to optimize anything, but rather find a product-market for an entirely new product. So we needed to address more than one opportunity to be able to create an MVP. Deciding which ones to validate and solve for first was difficult.”

But the team experienced some bright spots, too. They were lucky to have supportive management from the get-go, says Walid: “They gave us the room to properly explore the opportunity space. They also gave us whatever tools, resources, or other requests we needed.”

And it wasn’t just the management who contributed to their success. Walid says, “Engineers were super proactive as they were involved every step of the way. They created comprehensive prototypes with no requirements or briefs. Their invaluable contribution helped us quickly and effectively test with customers.”

And reflecting on the continuous discovery process as a whole, Walid can’t help but share his enthusiasm. “This process helped us innovate. We’re not copying competitors or creating something that already exists. We’re focusing on real customer problems that are yet to be solved or addressed in the market. We have early indications that we are about to provide real value to both our customer types, and it’s really exciting.”

Key Takeaways for Other Teams

Reflecting on the product team’s experience so far, Ahmed Guijou distills their learnings into a few key points.

• Never get complacent when it comes to interviewing customers

“No matter how repetitive the insights get, it’s important to keep your customers within arm’s reach—and there’s no better way to do this than by talking to them on a regular basis,” says Guijou. “If our insights got repetitive, we simply shifted our interview focus. There are always things we can learn more from our customers.”

No matter how repetitive the insights get, it’s important to keep your customers within arm’s reach—and there’s no better way to do this than by talking to them on a regular basis. – Tweet This

• Make sure the whole team is comfortable interviewing customers

Guijou stresses the importance of having everyone—whether product managers, designers, or engineers—get comfortable talking to customers. “It’s a lot more powerful when you talk to customers directly, as opposed to listening in on the conversation.”

It’s a lot more powerful when you talk to customers directly, as opposed to listening in on the conversation. – Tweet This

• Use interview snapshots religiously

Be sure to take notes during interviews in a format that others can easily understand. Guijou says his team took notes in real-time directly on the snapshot document and made sure to debrief soon after the interview to extract opportunities while the conversation was still fresh in their minds.

• Don’t be afraid to tear your trees down and build them again

“We had over ten different iterations on our tree,” says Guijou. He explains that after rounds of interviews, customer insights led them to identify different ways of looking at things and reshuffle the whole tree. “Changing direction is not a bad thing. Think of it as correcting instead of changing course. Always remain flexible, as new findings can emerge that might shift your focus.”

Changing direction is not a bad thing. Think of it as correcting instead of changing course. Always remain flexible, as new findings can emerge that might shift your focus. – Tweet This

• Every team member has a voice

The opportunity solution tree makes it easy to collaborate both within and outside the product team. “We loved dot-voting,” says Guijou. “It’s a fun and fair way for the team to make decisions quickly, and have an open discussion afterwards.”

2020 has taught us that we can’t anticipate the massive global changes that can transform our industry instantaneously. But we can develop skills and tools that will help us adapt to these unanticipated changes. The Seera product team’s story shows us how the opportunity solution tree can help teams quickly change course, evaluate new opportunities, and emerge with confidence in their new direction.

Reflecting on her experience with the Seera team, Hope says, “Working with the team as they evolved their approach to identify market needs, customer needs, and where to begin to prove that they were on the right track was so rewarding. They embraced the practices and were never discouraged—even when it was messy and they had to restructure their thinking. I know this journey will inspire other teams eager to experience the same purpose in their work by using continuous discovery methods and having supportive leaders who get why this is critical to success.”

Do you have a story about adopting continuous discovery at your company? Get in touch to let us know, and we may end up featuring your story in a future Product Talk post.

The post Product in Practice: When Travel Ground to a Halt, Seera Group Used Opportunity Mapping to Discover a New Market appeared first on Product Talk.