Alibi Discovery

Did that title make you cringe? I used to have the same reaction, but that has changed.

Product Discovery has become somewhat of a holy grail. We strive to explore the problem space, rapidly comparing and measuring solution options to hone in on the one that will yield the optimal price-performance ratio - and every action is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds.

However, if you are working in a B2B organization and/or corporate environement, reality will sometimes look quite differently. While we are researching and collecting the evidence to prove our causes are just, valuable and profitable, we recieve some requests:

• Marketing have this great story. It ties beautifully into the product strategy, gets great traction on customer calls and the CMO is personally championing it.

• Your biggest customer wants you to develop and deploy a very particular solution. Because - you guessed it - it ties into their marketing story.

• That customer also has another solution emerging from their experience planning. They aren't as enthusiastic about that one, but they filed for related IP with the US patent office, so please make sure to deliver by the end of Q2.

Unfocused? Yeah, probably.

Reshuffles your plans? No doubt.

Annoying, right? Wrong. Those are all opportunities to flex your product muscles.

As always, when confronted with unknowns, focus on the user. We have to assume that there is some merit in any request that we recieve, and it is our duty to map the impact, for good or for bad, and to gently steer the ship towards a path that is right for marketing and for the customer without compromising our product's value proposition and growth.

That marketing story might just be the next great thing if it's done right - let's find out. Identify the true problem statements this story should resolve, and test their validity, are they truly bothering your users? As always, someone else has tried something similar before, who are they, and what was their outcome? How can you improve on that, and can you validate that improvement in advance?

Shape it. Find the sensible, most common use-cases that the story touches, define the problems that the solution will solve and focus your organization's attention on these, providing everyone a view of the actual value and impact potential. Plan the shortest route to prototyping the most important of these, simulate and evaluate user responses.

Turn the story into real world data.

To conclude this subject - Alibi Discovery is a degradory term, and I propose to replace it.

Solution Value Validation Discovery anyone?