Continuous Product Discovery

"Talking to customers every single day like one-on-one onboarding drivers responding to support tickets, there's no centralized support team, there was no closer to the customer, right? And so I think that foundation actually for really understanding what moves the business and being super close to the customer actually is a pretty good foundation for them going on to say, okay, what do we actually want to build in a more scalable technology way?"

"Google, was what I call an evidence guided company. So essentially it put a high premium on focusing on customers, coming up with a lot of ideas on looking at the data, looking at how these ideas actually worked out. They weren't shy about launching betas and things that were very rough and incomplete and learning from that and then they expected people to take action based on the results."

"The moment the customer felt compelled enough to go out of their way to talk about some problem, that's a unbelievable gift. I will leave a meeting to just get one message back to them. If you're text message friendly with five or 10 of those, you are going to have so much direct signal that is infectious."

"The first step is to understand their problems and then understand if there's an opportunity here as opposed to, 'Hey, you want to build X thing for Y person.' So that's the biggest mistake that you really have to unteach and retrain thinking around."

"Well, the solution is simple but not easy to me. It's that we need to restructure the way we make products in a way which integrates research much more fully. It looks like consistent relationships in which researchers, and the work, and the insights they provide are a part of the process from beginning to end."

"I think researchers need to be more profit focused. And there are a lot of people out there who, I think they think that's not cool or not research's job, and I'm like, "Well, what are we doing then, if we're not helping businesses succeed?""

"There was a different type of engineer which you sent into the field. You would spend maybe Monday to Thursday and you would actually go into the building where the customer worked and you would work alongside them. You would literally get a desk there and so, that engineer became known as a forward deployed engineer."

"I can tell you that opportunity is an unmet need pain point or desire, and that's great. But I can tell you that 98% of people that write opportunities write them as solutions. So we tend to just really struggle with this distinction between the problem space and the solution space."

"I implemented a system to manage that kind of intake with four different touch points or events. So we have weekly demo days, working sessions, breaking news dress rehearsals, and office hours."

"In addition to that, we also do I mentioned breaking news dress rehearsals. And you can imagine this is exactly what it sounds like. We recreate their workflows in the new platform. This allows us to address any friction or issues of course that are occurring in their workflows."

"With weekly demo days, I facilitate those with my product design lead and my tech lead. And we use that as an open form of communication to deep dive into features that exist on our platform, also to preview or give a sneak peek of new features to come, and kind of recreate their workflows and do a show and tell."