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Episode 123 - Using Solution Tests to Make Sure You're Building Products Users Want (with Jim Morris, Founder @ Product Discovery Group)
Experimentation
Product Analytics
Product Design
Product Discovery
Episode 123: Using Solution Tests to Make Sure You're Building Products Users Want
Jim Morris, Founder @ Product Discovery Group
8 May 2022
8 May 2022
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About this Episode
An interview with Jim Morris. Jim's a product discovery & experimentation coach who wants teams to stop wasting their time with discovery if they're not going to do anything with it. He's currently running Product Discovery Group out in Silicon Valley.
We talk about a lot, including:
- The goals of Product Discovery Group, the problems he helps to solve, how he got started as a product discovery coach and that time he hung out with Jeff Bezos
- How many companies see funding as the ultimate validation of their idea but forget to talk to their customers and check if the idea is actually viable for the business
- Why we need to remember that product discovery is not just there as an artificial stage gate to delay decision making and should always serve the overall business goals
- How there are bad product companies with good product managers and good product companies with bad product managers, and how Silicon Valley startups are in the same boat as the rest of us when it comes to good product discovery practices
- How we can bed product discovery in with leadership, how to persuade them that there's a different way to lead, and how to skill up product teams that have never done product discovery before
- The concept of a Solution Test, the importance of presenting multiple solutions, why you have to get interactive rather than just show stuff, and why you should never concentrate on usability first
- How to apply structure to your discovery data collection to make it easier to extract insights from the data and turn them into action
And much more!
Contact Jim
You can reach out to Jim on Twitter, on LinkedIn or check out Product Discovery Group.
Related episodes you should like:
- Data-Informed Decision Making and the Three Cs of Product Management (Roger Snyder, VP of Products & Services @ 280 Group)
- Standing up for User Research... and User Researchers (Debbie Levitt, CXO @ DeltaCX and Author "Customers Know You Suck")
- Getting into the Habit of Continuous Discovery (Teresa Torres, Author "Continuous Discovery Habits")
- Building Life-Centred Products with Collaborative Product Discovery (Sophia Höfling, Co-founder & Head of Product @ Saiga)
- Test Business Ideas Ethically by Experimenting With, Not On, Customers (David Bland, Co-author "Testing Business Ideas")
- Doing the Splits to Accelerate your Product Growth (Andres Glusman, CEO @ DoWhatWorks & A/B Test Enthusiast)
- Chinese Startup Culture & Putting the Minimum into MVP (Carlos Lastres, Creative & Marketing Director @ Kaiyan Medical)
- Building a Culture of Continuous Discovery (Cindy Alvarez, Author "Lean Customer Development")
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