(2007-09-27) Cagan Product Discovery

Martin Cagan on the Wicked nature of Product Discovery. During your initial user discussions you find that users aren't as excited about the idea as your management was, and/or you struggle to come up with a ProtoType that users can figure out, and/or the users aren't excited about the ideas in the prototype when they test it. But the time is up, the engineers are ready, and the result is that during the next three to six months, engineering proceeds to build that same unusable and unexciting product that you saw in your prototype, and you ship, and then your management is of course disappointed in the results... But they do need to get past this. Product organizations need to come to terms with the fact that the product invention process is fundamentally a Creative process. It is more art than science. I prefer to think of this phase as "product discovery" more than "requirements and design.".. the perceived constrained (bottleneck) resource in just about every software product organization is the engineers, and the thought that an engineering team might be sitting around with nothing to do but play Foosball just drives management nuts. Ironically, it is precisely this reasoning that leads directly to wasted engineering resources. Realize that almost every company does this discovery process I've described here, instead of using one prototyper for a few weeks, they use the full engineering team for full release cycles to build the software that is then QA'ed and deployed into production systems. This is why it typically takes so many companies three or more releases over one to two years to get something usable and useful. They are using the engineering organization to build a very, very expensive ProtoType, and they use their live customers as unwitting test subjects.

Oct'2010 update: or is this Customer Discovery?

• no, his attitude is that you could have the right customer/problem identified, but still have an un-exciting product/solution designed. (2022-04-10) Cagan Jobs The Nature Of Product; Best Vs Rest