Scaling Product Discovery:
A 4-Part Series on Going from Single Tactics to Joint Progress

Many teams find themselves stuck in between uneven adoption of Product Discovery and having adaptable and evidence-focused Discovery practices in place. If you’re in an organization that is already partially bought-in to Discovery, but which has mixed uptake and results, or which has struggled with consistent efforts, you need a game plan that can help you navigate this middle area.

I have worked with companies pushing through these problems time and time again, and this series will outline frameworks that I use to combat the obstacles that often appear.

In this series you will learn:

• Common reasons teams have problems scaling Discovery practices, and how to determine the root of your team’s struggles implementing Discovery
• Different states companies often move through as they develop the best practices for Discovery
• How a real company handled scaling, and what they learned from the process
• Ways to solidify and measure your Product Discovery adoption

This series serves as an overview to kickstart how to think through Discovery problems at a high level. For each topic covered, you will have the opportunity to go into detail and further practical advice with a series of articles that expand on each topic.

Introduction

Product Discovery is a never-ending practice: if your company is still up and running, there’s always going to be questions about what areas you should explore, and how you navigate uncertainty around the problems and solutions worth investing in. This series will help you understand the journey of scaling Product Discovery to build an effective upgrade to your processes. It will also give you frameworks to deal with sustaining and course correcting your Product Discovery practices over time. 

Content Overview

Section 1: Start with what’s missing

Improving your Product Discovery starts with identifying the gaps of your Product Discovery practices. These are areas that I find are most likely to cause companies problems as they are expanding Product Discovery and can hinder the cross-functionality needed to do good Discovery work.

The three buckets I put most problems into are:

• Systemic gaps, where many teams may be involved in Discovery, and there are various ways of tracking and measuring Discovery projects, but team systems are not working together to form a continuous Discovery practice
• Skill gaps, where teams are engaging in Discovery activities but are limited to certain tools or approaches by their lack of knowledge, which curbs their ability to do deep Product work
• Insight gaps, where teams have a hard time accessing, sharing or interpreting the information they get from their Discovery work in order to drive results

Your team may be encountering one or more of these; identifying which is the biggest roadblock for which teams gives you a good groundwork from which to move forward in evaluating where your Discovery process is. This will help you make choices about what solutions to implement first. 

Section 2: Evaluate Where you want to Go

The second evaluation you should do as you start to scale and improve your Product Discovery is to know where your team is in the NADA Evolution of Product Discovery.

The NADA Evolution is a series of states that your team may be in:

• Neglected: where teams are not approaching Discovery as a system connected with results
• Alibi: where teams use surface-level insight or instruction from a variety of sources to make decisions and move forward, rather than engaging in deeper, reasoned choices
• Dogmatic: where teams rigidly adhere to frameworks and arbitrary benchmarks even if those aren’t the best way to approach the current problem
• Adapted: where teams have the skills, resources, processes and context they need to drive good Discovery work

The most productive state to be in is an Adapted one –– keeping in mind that teams can move in and out of these states or even combine them as they face new challenges. 

Like understanding the gaps your team faces, understanding what state your Product Discovery practices are in will help you to pinpoint the underlying causes of your organization’s problems. While it can feel urgent to jump into making changes as soon as possible, evaluation must come first. Only with the full picture on where your teams are actually falling short can you make efficient and effective choices as to how to improve.

Section 3: Case study: Scaling Product Discovery with The Stepstone Group

While Discovery will look different for every company, taking learnings from other organizations that have scaled Discovery can be helpful guidance. I was fortunate enough to sit down with Sarah Reeves, Senior Product Ops Manager from The Stepstone Group, to talk about their learning from scaling Product Discovery after consulting with their team. For all of Sarah’s insights, you can find the highlights of our conversation at Improving and Scaling your company’s Product Discovery practices with Sarah Reeves from The Stepstone Group. One I want to pull out here is using Product principles to inform the way teams work on Discovery.  

“Do more of an MVP for certain areas to find and prove value quickly,” Sarah recommends. That will give you “evidence to show […] the benefit of doing things this way.” 

In practice, that means: Define a clear MVP for how you want to change things, test it with a small group of the organization, and measure progress to prove the value of your initiative. This will make it easier to scale upskilling efforts that have worked.

Section 4: Measuring your progress and success

Measuring your Product Discovery adoption requires that you think about both qualitative and quantitative indicators of success. Organizations that are serious about Product Discovery must let go of the idea that metrics like number of tests run or user interviews completed are the only way to gain strong insights into how successful Product Discovery is and how well new Discovery practices have been taken on board by teams. 

It can be useful to track team activities and see the frequency that teams engage in different Discovery tactics or activities. But there also needs to be an indication that these are the right tactics to answer the questions at hand.

Qualitative signals also need to be tracked, especially when trying to scale Product Discovery across an organization, as these can tie into activities that directly relate to upskilling and building cross-functional workflows. 

This discussion continues in Going Beyond Quantity for Measuring Product Discovery Adoption, where you will learn more about getting an effective read on the progress and success of your work.

Maintaining momentum

You’ve probably noticed by now that a theme to this series is that you need to constantly process the information that is coming out of your team’s approaches and then continuously refine. There is good reason for this –– scaling Product Discovery is not something that is a straight line from A to B. Rather, it’s building the knowledge, resilience, and good habits in your workplace to consistently engage in productive Discovery practices.

While we’ve touched on how to start doing this here, this is only the beginning. If you haven’t already explored the rest of these pieces, read on for more about each of the topics mentioned in this series introduction:

• The Gaps of Product Discovery
• The "NADA" Evolution of Product Discovery
• Improving and Scaling your company’s Product Discovery practices with Sarah Reeves from The Stepstone Group
• How Measuring Discovery Adoption on Quality can guide Product Discovery Decisions