Overview
You’re tired of building products nobody uses. Your users keep asking for features, but you suspect they don’t actually need what they’ve asked for.
Sound familiar?
In this tutorial, Kent McDonald shares a set of discovery techniques from the worlds of business analysis and product management. You’ll find out how to use those techniques to identify the real problem underlying a request for a solution.
These techniques include:
- Story-based interviews that get people to tell you what they actually do (not what they think they’ll do—people are terrible at predicting the future).
- Decision filters you can use to get rid of bad ideas
- Problem statements that keep your team focused on outcomes.
You’ll walk away with templates, techniques, and the confidence to push back when stakeholders hand you solutions disguised as requirements.
Learning Objectives
- Learn how to use story based interviews to uncover your users needs.
- Facilitate conversations to establish powerful problem statements.
- Understand how to create and use decision filters for more effective prioritization decisions
Slides
Handouts
Story-Based Interview Guide
Problem Statement Template
Decision Filter Worksheet
Additional Resources
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Decision Filters
Organizations are impacted on a daily basis by decisions made by people at every level. Even the most minute seeming tactical decisions can have an impact on the overall organization. Successful organizations realize this and look for ways to align the decision making at all parts of the organization so that the people who are …
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Explaining discovery for internal products
In a previous issue of InsideProduct, I shared the key points from our ProductTank Des Moines/Ames discussion about product discovery. Many of the ideas discussed were applicable to products in general, but mostly assumed products that an organization sells to people outside the organization. In this issue of InsideProduct, I thought it was about time …
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Problem Statement
What It Is The problem statement is a structured set of statements that describe the purpose of an effort in terms of what problem it’s trying to solve. An Example Since the most important part of this technique is the conversations that occur rather than the end product, I’d like to relay a story about …
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What Jobs to Be Done Teaches us about Interviews
Photo Credit: https://unsplash.com/@alejandroescamilla Over the past week I read through When Coffee and Kale Compete by Alan Klement to get an idea of how Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) can be applied to internal products. JTBD is the idea that people “hire” products in order to get jobs done. There’s an increasing realization that it’s …