24/36 : 🔁 Continuous discovery & Product market matrix
Focus on signal over noise. Don't waste time on stuff that doesn't actually make things better
What is continuous product discovery?
Continuous product discovery is a tool—and a mindset—that helps product teams decide what to build.
Let’s break down the definition, starting with the word product.
There was a time—which still exists in some companies today—when product decisions came from the ideas and intuitions of the product team, or worse—their executives. These ideas might come from:
The startup CEO looking to scratch their own itch
A PM whose gut tells them feature X will be a hit
The loudest person in the workshop, brainstorming, or sprint planning
An observation that a competitor just built a new feature
There can be value in these voices, but these inputs are missing an essential external perspective: the customer.
Why is continuous product discovery important?
Successful product development is about co-creating with customers. And since a product is never really done, these customer conversations need to happen continuously.
Here are some other reasons why you need to make your discovery process continuous.
1. Evolve your product with your customer’s changing needs
There are always multiple ways to address a given challenge. And with every change to your product, a user may discover new needs and desires they hadn’t previously realized. Continuous discovery allows you to evolve your product alongside your users’ evolving needs.
2. Bring more clarity to backlog prioritization
No matter how much that last release boosted adoption or customer satisfaction, there’s always the next round of prioritization and refinement to decide what to build next.
Frequent customer conversations bring continuous clarity on how to best prioritize your product roadmap.
3. Increase confidence in your decisions
Even with a well-refined product discovery process, your studies and interviews will always be drawing from a limited sample. So there’s always the risk that research participants don’t reflect your target customer base.
Conducting frequent user research increases your sample size, boosts confidence that you’re discovering the most pressing and widely experienced user pains, and enables better decision-making—as long as you’re asking the right people the right questions, which we’ll get to below.
4. Align customer and business goals
Much of successful product design and development is about balancing the goals of your customers and those of the company. In an ideal world, the perfect solution for customers is the best driver of business value. But reality is often more nuanced.
Continuous interactions with users, alongside clear awareness of business goals, maximize the chances of finding that happy medium.
5. Avoid assumption-based development
No matter how objective we try to be, assumptions from product managers, UX designers, engineering teams, and sales squads are always lurking. And often these assumptions—built on small samples, confirmation bias, and personal desires—go undetected.
Continuous discovery opens the door for your customer to call out these assumptions.
How to get started with continuous product discovery
To effectively run continuous discovery—with a minimum weekly cadence—you have to set up systems to support it.
Here are six steps to help get you in the loop of continuous discovery.
1. Commit to a continuous mindset
Product discovery is not a linear phase that starts at project kick-off and ends with hand-off for delivery. Discovery and delivery are continuous processes that should happen in parallel. You’re always delivering, and you’re always discovering.
So establishing a continuous mindset is about transforming assumptions into hypotheses, using hypotheses to set up experiments, and using experiments to refine ideas.
As Teresa Torres puts it, the trick is to shift “from output-focus to outcome-focus.”
It’s not just about discovering what people need, then creating a solution (output-focus). It’s about keeping a particular goal in mind—be it customer satisfaction or monthly recurring revenue—and continually testing assumptions to help you reach those objectives (outcome-focus).
2. Assemble your discovery trio
If teams don’t start from the same set of assumptions and knowledge base, it’s hard to get them aligned on the same solutions.
To help overcome this, Teresa Torres suggests assembling a cross-functional team including a product manager, an experience designer, and a software engineer. A “product trio,” as she calls it.
Their focus should be on collaboration, not on their specific roles.
This trio conducts continuous research together and creates a shared understanding of customer needs and opportunities to address their pains. They should be empowered to run their own interviews, without the need for a centralized research team.
3. Automate your weekly discovery process
Where will you ever find time to squeeze weekly research into an already busy schedule?
The simplest way is to block off a weekly recurring time for discovery. You can start with as little as 30 minutes. This way it’s built into the schedule, rather than a spontaneous appearance on your calendar.
And how do you recruit a steady stream of users?
Your goal is to reduce the need for your product team to be involved in the logistics. Ideally, they just show up during the weekly scheduled time, ready to ask the right questions.
4. Improve your research questions and techniques
As you increase the frequency of customer interactions, you also need to improve their effectiveness.
The first step is to ensure that you’re speaking to people familiar with the problem you’re aiming to solve. That’s why asking active customers is one of the best sources of feedback.
The next step is to make sure you’re asking the right questions. Here are a few tips for how to conduct better research.
Be curious: Slow down and push deeper into your user’s experience.
Avoid leading questions: Asking “What made this a good experience?” influences a participant’s response and skews your results. Instead, keep questions neutral like “How was your experience?”
Listen first, ask second: We often worry so much about asking our next question that we don’t listen to the answers.
Ixnay the jargon: Your language should be simple and straightforward. Remove internal lingo and industry-specific terms.
Test your questions: Before an unmoderated study, run your questions by a few people to make sure they’re clear and easy to comprehend.
People are also prone to all kinds of cognitive biases and distortions. So another suggestion from Teresa Torres is to focus on past behavior, rather than ideal behavior. For example:
Instead of: ‘What do you like to eat?’
Try: 'Tell me about the last restaurant you went to.’
And remember: it’s not just about getting ideas, it’s about developing empathy for your users.
5. Visualize your thinking with opportunity trees and experience maps
A byproduct of continuous discovery is that you get inundated with information. From user needs, pains, and desires, to suggested solutions, features, and opportunities.
This is partly why you do it—to get ideas from actual and potential users, rather than being restricted to what you can come up with on your own.
Don’t try to hold it all in your head. Grab a whiteboard, a notebook, or a visual collaboration tool and visualize that information. Here are a few suggestions:
Experience map: Draw out your understanding of your customers’ experiences and the surrounding opportunity space.
Interview snapshot: Create a one-page summary from each interview you conduct.
Opportunity solution tree: Start with a desired outcome at the root, then branch off into opportunities and potential solutions that come out of your customer interviews.
What is Ansoff Matrix
The Ansoff Matrix (also known as the Product / Market Expansion Grid) is a strategic framework designed for organizations who want to move beyond 'business as usual'.
It's designed to help you figure out which of four strategic directions you should take to successfully grow your business. The Ansoff Matrix was created by Igor Ansoff in 1957, and the matrix is as relevant today as it was over 50 years ago.
That's the sign of a strategic framework that must have gotten something right!
The four strategies in the Ansoff Matrix are as follows:
Market Penetration: Focuses on increasing sales of existing products in an existing market.
Market Development: Targeting with current products in a new market.
Product Development: Introducing new products in an existent market for expansion.
Diversification: Introducing new products in a new market.
If you analyse all the four strategies, we can see that Market Penetration seems to be the least risky, and diversification being the high-risk strategy.
How to Implement The Ansoff Matrix
OK, so now we know what the Ansoff Matrix is all about, and how powerful it can be in helping organizations to grow their business. Let's take a look at how exactly to implement it.
1) Start by identifying your strengths.
It's no secret that for the most part, playing to your strengths is a good starting point. There is a range of tools you can use to help identify your strengths as an organization, from SWOT to the more advanced SCOPE analysis techniques - so we won't cover that here. Ultimately, it's about asking yourself critical questions such as:
What makes me different from my competitors?
Why do people buy from me instead of others?
What am I proudest of about my company?
Answering those questions should give you some insight as to which part of the Ansoff Matrix to attack first. For example:
Companies whose product is just average, but are great at making their marketing campaigns stand out, should probably be looking at market penetration or even development.
Companies who have a proven track record of creating solid products (though haven't always been on point with their marketing strategy), are better suited to implement a product development or diversification strategy.
2) Determine your risk appetite.
OK, so just because you're good at something, doesn't mean you should stick to doing only that. In fact, the right move may be to push yourself a little harder - either because you see a big opportunity or even a big looming threat to your current industry.
The more risk appetite you have, the further away from your strengths you might want to push yourself. Generally speaking, the risk factors of the Ansoff Matrix look like this:
Figure out where you want or need to sit on that spectrum and use that to influence your decision as to which quadrant to attack.
3) Finally, make a plan.
Now that you've chosen which part of the Ansoff Matrix you want to attack, it's time to make a plan. Start by creating a succinct vision statement that captures what you're trying to achieve.
If you were Apple and were about to pursue the diversification strategy, you might have had a vision statement somewhere along the lines of:
"To capture the hearts, minds (and wallets) of a new generation of a computer geek, through innovative technology that increases their access to pop culture staples such as music and movies."
(OK, so I made that up on the spot - it's not an actual Apple vision statement, but you get the idea!)
Once you've got your vision, the rest of your strategic plan should be much easier to create.
Coca-Cola: Case Study
The objective of every business is to grow, be it a start-up that’s just closed its first deal or an established market leader seeking to further increase profitability. But how does a business decide upon the best strategy for growth? The Ansoff Matrix management tool offers a solution to this question by assessing the level of risk – considering whether to seek growth through existing or new products in existing or new markets.
To demonstrate the robustness and legitimacy of Ansoff’s Matrix, it has been applied to Coca-Cola, the most well-known trade name in the world and a company today operating in over 200 countries, and a brand that has undertaken countless growth strategies in its 100+ year history.
