Prioritizing generative research in continuous discovery

My posts usually don’t assume much previous knowledge. This one does, so if you’re not familiar with continuous product discovery Teresa Torres style, then read Continuous Discovery Habits (it’s great) or her blog posts/talks.

Product trio sharing and caring

During the autumn I started hosting monthly product trio sharing sessions with our product trios. The purpose is to share and together get better at continuous discovery. Now when all our product teams are working this way we want improvements not just to stay in one team when they can benefit everyone. Plus I think talking about continuous discovery is strengthening our trios confidence.

We usually start out with some trio sharing an insight or a change they tried out, then we do lean coffee discussions.

Not prioritizing generative research

I want to share what came up in yesterdays product trio sharing session because it was great and I think resonated with almost everyone.

One of our trios shared how they worked during the autumn, doing really great work with solution discovery and assumption testing. In the end of the year 2022 they had come up with a great solution to a real problem and was well on the way to deliver it. But then came the planning process for the next year, where the team were to set their OKRs for 2023, guided by the company strategy. They struggled with this because the focus had been on solution discovery and finding out what works to reach their goals, not talking to users to find opportunities. The team realized they need to work with generative research and finding opportunities all the time, even though this might not necessarily contribute to their current goal. If they don’t, they risk ending up in the back seat and miss a lot of good opportunities that could really help the company grow.

There were a lot of recognition among the other trios. As we have adopted a continuous discovery mindset, we have become really good at assumption testing. We meet users a lot, to understand their needs connected to specific solutions and to do usability testing. But we struggle to make time for the broad and generative research to find new opportunities.

Why does this happen?

There may be several reasons behind this.

At Hemnet we set OKRs each half year and teams are really motivated to deliver on their goals. This is great. But in our ambition to reach the outcome it is easy to forget that after we have delivered, we need to set goals for the next half year which requires us to really know the user and the business. Generative research is not prioritized because we are so keen on delivering on our time-bound goals.

It can also be a problem of narrowing down goals/OKRs too much. If the outcome is almost pointing out a specific solution, there is not much room for generative research. This can become a negative spiral. Management sees that the team don’t really know their users so they suggest narrow goals. The team don’t feel that there is room in their goals to understand their users better so they de-prioritize generative research and it goes on.

How to fix it

Some ideas that came up on how to fix this:

• Make discovering new opportunities an explicit responsibility of the product trio – we want to have everyone around the teams to understand that this is something teams do and need to prioritize.
• Just do it – do more generative research and communicate the insights so others understand the team knows a lot about their users.
• Have more people inside and outside the team prioritize being part of user interviews – so more people see the benefit.
• Having a new and separate cadence for generative user interviews (today we have a cadence for user interviews in general, which is mostly assumption testing).

Thank you all teams and product trios for the generous and honest sharing session! You rock.

Recommendations

This interview with Teresa Torres where she talks about the difference between solution discovery and opportunity discovery

Hemnet Meetup – Practical tips for user research – a talk where our star user research director Niklas is describing how we do user research efficient and fun at Hemnet