Currently, I’m immersed in the reading of “Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products That Create Customer Value and Business Value” by Teresa Torres. This is a reading that I recommend to all the people that want to start or evolve in a Product Manager role.

Some multiple articles and books speak about product management, focusing on the process as a whole. This book is oriented to the creation of habits to continuously explore and discover the problem space surrounding your product, instead of doing it once in a while.

One of the things that you will listen to many times is: Don’t fall in love with the idea, do it with the problem you want to solve. Product teams are pursued by cognitive biases (mental shortcuts that sometimes get us into trouble). Basically by two of them:

• Confirmation bias. We are more likely to seek out confirming than disconfirming evidence.
• Escalation of commitment. The more we invest in an idea, the more committed we become to it.

To avoid these two biases, Teresa Torres recommends to us the following aspects:

• Select a set of ideas that solve the target opportunity. That way we’ll avoid being directed only by one idea and let us continuously discover and learn more about the problem and pivot the solution if needed.
• Don’t test ideas, test assumptions instead. This will unlock the cadence of discovery iterations because assumptions are easy to test and require less effort.
• Enumerate the assumptions related to the solution. There are 5 types: desirability, viability, feasibility, usability and ethical. You can use several tools that help you generate a list of assumptions, like story mapping, Pre-Morten analysis, opportunity solution tree, and exploring potential harm. Some of the assumptions could be shared by more than one idea.
• Map and prioritize the assumptions (check this link for an overview of the technique) based on how much we know about the assumption and how important is to the success of the idea. Start with the assumptions that are more important and have less evidence.
• Test the assumptions. A strong assumption test simulates an experience, allowing your participant to behave either following your assumption or not. Behavior is what allows us to evaluate our assumptions. Define upfront what success looks like to avoid confirmation bias and align the team.
• Don’t do big tests. Try to be as lean as possible, and look for early signals before moving to large-scale experiments.
• Be aware of false positives and false negatives. They can let you fall into confirmation bias. Try to use a mix of research methods (triangulation) that allows you to understand better the assumption.
• Learn from the results of your test that confirms or disconfirms your assumptions, and evolve your ideas. If your assumptions disconfirm the basics, don’t be afraid to leave the opportunity and jump to the following one. There are many fishes in the ocean.

Take a deeper look at the book, it’s really worth it. As a Spanish proverb says “One can never know too much”.