Product Bakery – The Product Management, UX & Design Podcast · Alex Dapunt and Christian Strunk

#111 The Product Discovery 101

April 24, 2023·22 min·5 clips

Christian opens by asking Alex how he actually does product discovery. Alex says it is one of his favorite topics. They treat discovery as a process that changes with the team, senior leadership, and the number of people involved. Alex says their current flow looks a lot like double diamond design thinking, and he is careful to note that it is not linear. Teams may loop through the same stages several times before moving forward. Between those stages, they hold alignment meetings with senior leadership. Teams come prepared with quick pitches. Those pitches explain the problem, what they found, and why the work deserves attention. That matters most for items that are not yet on the roadmap. The triad of PM, engineering manager, and product designer shows up again at the management level. Leadership gives feedback so the team can prioritize or push the idea forward. The same pattern repeats once the solution space is being discussed. Only after the solution is defined does the work move toward sprint planning and roadmap planning, then into the scrum backlog. Discovery happens alongside normal development, not outside it. Teams need some sprint capacity reserved for it. PMs and product designers usually lead the discovery work, though they may still need input from the rest of the team. Once the work is defined, the designer and PM shift into a support role, helping engineers with specs and assets. The episode closes by stressing that discovery should stay quick and flexible. Ideas that do not validate should be set aside. Christian also points listeners to Spotify's new feature that lets them interact directly with the show by asking questions and sharing feedback or ideas.

As heard by us

A practical take on discovery as an iterative team process.

Christian and Alex present product discovery as a living practice, not a fixed playbook. The conversation keeps returning to early starts, repeated passes through both the problem and solution space, and alignment meetings with senior leadership to keep the work aimed in the…

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A practical discovery reset for anyone juggling PM, design, engineering, and senior leadership.

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