Prototypes are part of the philosophy of building things that don’t scale during product discovery. Prototypes are used to test information and workflows and gather user insights for value validation and risk mitigation. There are four major categories or use purposes of prototypes: 1) for feasibility testing, 2) for simulation, 3) for live-data gathering and testing, and 4) hybrid versions that combine features of the previous three categories.

While product teams can generate and hypothesize product ideas in silos, most of those ideas rarely succeed. Successful product ideas require consistent and detailed interaction with customers and analysis of their behavior. Customer interviews, empathizing by living their lives, and rigorous behavior analysis are required for effective idea generation. — During product discovery, product teams need to employ methods that generate ideas that are the most likely to help solve their business problems and minimize risks, and when the team interacts directly and frequently with real users and customers, then finding sufficient quantity and quality of ideas should not be…

To structure a scaffolding around product discovery, depending on the complexity of the problem we are solving for, product teams can resort to Story Mapping or Customer Discovery to manage efforts — After scoping a product discovery project to create alignment and mitigate risks, it’s time to execute the discovery journey and the first step is to plan for it. Very similar to the scoping process, planning can take the form of a small to a large size project depending on the…

Depending on the complexity of your project, a scope of a product discovery journey can be small, medium, or large. For each of these scenarios, product teams need to use techniques that minimize costs and risks to discover solutions that create value. — While most product discovery efforts can be kicked off with little upfront investments, in larger projects or initiatives that entail multiple teams/projects, we will need to scope and frame the discovery work for two reasons:

Product discovery is a variety of techniques that aims to minimize five key risks that product teams face: 1) Value 2) Usability 3) Feasibility 4) Viability 5) Ethics — Product discovery is the main responsibility of product managers and it aims to mitigate five crucial risks opposing commercial value creation: Value: is there a demand for the solution? Usability: will the customers be able to understand and utilize our product?

Product culture is about excellence in product discovery and delivery. It can be quite obvious when you are at a workplace with a strong product culture and when not. In short, product teams with an amazing product culture have high levels of innovation and development velocities. — The successful discovery of great products is about product teams and techniques that manifest within the product culture of the product organization. In essence, effective product culture can be measured along two dimensions:

Team objectives should empower and motivate teams and measure progress in a meaningful manner. OKRs are to effectively manage teams, bring focus to work, and create alignment. At scale, the product leadership will play a key role in developing and monitoring OKRs for product success — When setting objectives for product teams, two fundamental principles should be addressed: Objectives structures and planning should empower and motivate team members to do their best work

While the product vision is to inspire and lead teams, product strategy is about execution management and how to deliver on the vision. There are 8 core principles to constructing an effective product vision and 5 for setting effective product strategies. — Defining the product vision The product vision aims to paint a picture of what the product desires to become in the next 2–5 years for software and 5–10 for hardware devices. A product vision describes how the team aims to attain its goals and gains inspiration from the corporate mission which is a higher-level…

Strong product teams acknowledge that most launches fail and strive to minimize risks and maximize experimentation to build on validated commitments — Great product roadmaps are those that are focused on delivering business results and not output (i.e., feature rollout). In the operating sense of things, product roadmaps are prioritized lists of features/projects for a product team to work on and are generally developed on a rolling three months basis, but depending…