Continuous Discovery

What is a stream team, who is involved, who is not involved and where are they in the organisation.

Stream teams create products. But there needs to be a continuous focus on ensuring that they are headed in the right direction. We examine the daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly activities of stream teams.

It can be hard to identify where to make changes and how to approach it. We'll look at how you can convert ideas into action.

The team is responsible for their way of working. This means that they control how they work and any changes that they want to take on. There is no need for centralised sign-off.

The purpose of continuous research and the principles that underpin it.

What is generative research, what is it good for and when is it used?

What is evaluative research, what is it good for and when is it used?

The biggest trap that teams fall into is starting with a solution or an assumption. To build the best products you need to start with the customer.

A great way to think about solving customers' problems is to uncover the jobs that they are trying to achieve and the challenges they encounter along the way.

Map out the customer problem journey to highlight the key struggles that trigger people to shift from one stage of the journey to the next.

We look at the key generative research methods and when each is most appropriate.

Before we start interviewing we need to put in place the ground rules so we know what to focus on and how to mitigate against our biases.

We all have biases. We need to be aware of our biases so that we can uncover the real needs of users and not influence our findings.

People lie. We all do. We don't mean it. But we say what people want to hear, or what we want to believe about ourselves. Your job is to uncover the truth. And we'll discuss how.

This is one of the first stumbling blocks for a lot of teams. But given its importance, this can't be left to a single person or as an ad-hoc task. We'll discuss ways of automating recruitment.

Face-to-face or online? How many people should be in the room? What should everyone do? Should you record it? Figure out the best practices for running interviews.

How do you write up the details of the interviews that you perform? We'll talk through a few methods for writing up the key points.

The first step to uncovering insights from the research data is to map the user journey.

Different people will have different experiences using your product. But rarely does that come down to age or other demographics. We'll discuss how to create personas that accurately reflect your different customer segments.

Mapping pain points is about listing specific things that people have said. Once you start seeing trends you'll get a clearer idea of the areas to focus.

Hidden data is as valuable as no data. We look at the ways that teams can communicate the process as well as the findings to ensure better understanding and buy-in.

Our research will uncover lots of customer pain points and problems. We need to turn these challenges into solutions. This is where ideation comes in. Using the research and team objectives as inputs the team should brainstorm potential solutions for the problems.

Using a solution tree you can discover trends, uncover more options, align opportunities to real customer needs and have alternative options available should your experiments prove your assumptions false.

Ideas are never in short supply. But not all ideas are equal and we have limited capacity. We look at the ways that you can prioritise your opportunities.

Our products accumulate debt over time. Whether it is product debt (bad features), design debt (incoherent designs) or tech debt(invalidated assumptions), the accumulation of debt over time makes our product harder to maintain and slower to upgrade. We look at how some teams merge debt reduction in with their development timelines.

The first step of analysing an idea is to map it to the customer journey to understand the experience of the user and the steps involved.

Each step in our user journey contains multiple assumptions. Identify the assumptions to unable early testing without having to invest in the full solution.

Not all assumptions are equal. We look at ways of prioritising our assumptions so we know where to start our testing.