Archive of posts with tag 'Discovery'
We Did All This Discovery, Now How Do We Decide? →
February 25, 2025 • #When capturing hundreds of problems during product discovery, we generate at least as many potential solutions. We can’t build everything at once, so how do we decide what to tackle first? Ryan Singer has a suggestion:
The counterintuitive thing is, we often feel like our task is to get to a “yes.” But what we actually need is a way to say “no.” It’s the ability to eliminate many, many things that aligns us on the one thing. It’s the “no, no, no, … YES!” that gives us the power to move forward and to stick with a project.
Finding the “reasons to build” for any given solution is easy — every idea is “good” on some continuum. When faced with a hundred ideas, each with compelling reasons to build it, we’re left with the fuzzy question of “how good?”
Ryan’s suggestion inverts the question: look for the reasons to not build it. Is there a workaround? Is it merely annoying but not a dealbreaker? What are users doing today instead? What are the real consequences of the status quo?
This inversion approach is more likely to highlight the acute pains — the missing solutions causing real negative consequences, the ones with no good alternatives or workarounds.
The first key to prioritizing is to triage the obvious “not now”s first. If we can cut our list down significantly, we can focus attention on where we’ll make the biggest impact.