#8 Balancing incentives and obstacles
Many product leaders want to incentivize teams to do continuous discovery, yet there are a bunch of obstacles that are never addressed.
For some reason, it's easier to think about incentives first - and forget about the system's constraints that the teams experience.
"Go and do discovery! Learn! We need to talk to customers!" says a charismatic leader.
At the same time, everyone's calendar is a mess and no one is able to dedicate time to ideate, map out assumptions, design experiments, execute them, and translate the evidence generated into insights.
If you want to do discovery continuously, it's not enough to have cross-functional teams in place, assign them problems to solve (as opposed to features to build), train and coach them, provide them with the right toolkit, and measure evidence and confidence levels as part of your company's decision-making framework.
You have to, simultaneously, identify and address what's currently in the way (the obstacles/constraints):
- Do your teams even have dedicated time to do discovery? How might you create an environment where they do?
- Do your engineers want to be part of discovery? Why not?
- Are you able to pivot direction if new evidence comes to light from all the experimentation they're doing?
- Will a team still be drawning with hard delivery deadlines from executives, while asked to "do discovery on this new opportunity"? Is this a challenge?
What obstacles have you faced while doing continuous discovery?
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Hey there š Iām Afonso, Founder & Partner at Scandinavian Product Group. Thanks for reading :)