Are you stopping innovation?
Unlock the power of questioning assumptions
To support company growth and sales ambitions, product leaders typically want to create value for their customers better than anyone else. Innovative differentiation helps customers do things easier, faster and more effectively, can outweigh shortcomings and drive growth. Creating products customers value and even love does not happen by mistake. It requires deep customer empathy and continuous learning.
The outcome of encouraging learning supports your team's capacity to iterate and learn fast to make great products. This week's Confident Product Leader focuses on driving teams' curiosity and going beyond basic assumptions; the habit is questioning uncertainties to encourage learning.
But we have no time for product discovery
CEO and founder frustrations often zero in on “things are taking too long”, which in some cases is very accurate. Frequently, the CEO reacts to a desire to research and experiment negatively because these activities are a luxury you can’t afford. The perception of this process is frequently, “All this product discovery stuff will just slow us down. We know what we need to build”.
While at a high level, it might be true that you know what direction to take the product, the details and customer nuances must be met if you expect customers to obtain value. The CEO can’t afford to spend money that doesn't solve the customers' problems. A genuine issue for many companies is they don’t have enough customer knowledge, and their assumptions are false.
False customer assumptions lead directly to low customer adoption. There are zero-wins shipping features that customers do not use. The proven approach to creating products customers use and pay for is adopting a learning mindset that pokes at the assumptions to uncover the root causes your product can solve.
Truth is, you can’t afford not to be learning.
The wrong emotions kill decision velocity
Two human emotions regularly get in the way of teams' learning and innovation. We allow fear and ego to overly bias our behaviours.
Product decisions can take far too long to finalise, often with fear of them being wrong. It can be difficult to confess, but many company cultures make it very hard to admit we do not know something. Equally tricky is challenging consensus when you have a concern. Individual's egos can take a dent by speaking out. To innovate and create genuine differentiation, you must embrace what is unknown and celebrate learning.
Fear of damaging your brand and giving prospective customers a negative impression of your company or product holds many leaders back. This idea that only polished, complete products can be taken to market often kills the learning pace. The reality is marketing with a polished product that doesn't do what the customer needs is far more damaging. Iterating with the market can take the customers on a journey with you and build trust and deeper brand relationships than any Big Bang release.
Just trying to help
In other situations, leadership, not knowing any better, dives into the details and tells teams what to do next. This is often referred to by team members as HiPPO (Highest Paid Persons Opinion). In some cases, not all, leadership simply felt the best way they could help was to direct the way forward. A problem here is that decisions are based on uncertain assumptions and often must be corrected. Granular decisions made by the founder CEO can feel as if the nuances of the problem have been missed.
Copying competitors gets nowhere fast
Instead of learning about the customer, it is easy to fall into the copycat trap. This might work in some narrow situations, but if your goal is to solve customer problems better than anyone else, this wastes effort and money.
Copying features cannot create differentiation. Copying features means you risk copying what the customer does not desire, like, or even use. Perhaps the biggest mistake is thinking, “They are a huge company. They wouldn't have built that feature without research.” Trust me, global software companies make many mistakes, too; in fact, they can afford to make mistakes a smaller company can’t.
Learning faster than your competitors is a significant advantage
The aspiration is to iterate fast, using tight feedback loops, learn what matters and wow your customers. This needs a learning environment. Your teams must feel safe to challenge assumptions, no matter the job title of the person who raised them.
A lot is involved in achieving a learning environment; one contributing factor is leadership that encourages learning. By adopting a habit of questioning uncertainty, you will lead by example and give permission to challenge assumptions.
Real-world example
A coaching client of mine, Jo (not their real name), was struggling with perceived slow delivery times. The reality was product decisions were made entirely from internal beliefs. Sometimes, the belief would be from the CEO, other times a team member, but rarely was there substantial evidence.
She dealt with two problems: delivery was perceived as slow, and user adoption was poor. Their product analytics showed a pattern of hardly used features. She believed recency bias was the root cause; the last customer noise she heard was driving decisions.
Jo transformed to make learning an objective and turn the product's mediocre revenue trend into high growth. This effort involved CEO agreement (they remained sceptical) and coaching product managers on discovery techniques.
Three months into this transformation journey, I reflected on the critical success criteria with Jo. She commented that questioning assumptions and unknowns had been vital. This alone would not land a transformation, but she felt sure they would have failed without it.
Questioning uncertainties encouraged learning. It removed the fear of not having the answers, as she made it clear to her team that she did not have the answers. She warned the CEO she would question his assumptions, and when the HiPPO behaviour appeared, she gently questioned the assumptions. Although she rarely questioned him directly, she often asked the question to others in front of the CEO, so he was not put in a position to defend his idea, for example, “Great, building feature X could help customer do Y faster. Can we test the assumptions? Perhaps the product team can explore how customers react to Y being faster?”
Jo always followed up on these questions and insisted on evidence. Teams did not take long to second guess the questions and started coming to meetings with experiment plans. Jo continued to question and challenge whether the experiment plans focused on the right areas, given their limited resources.
By month 3, teams were coming to the meetings with evidence and learnings, decisions were moving forward with more substantial confidence, and the focus was on areas that no one had considered months before.
More importantly, features were released in smaller chunks, and adoption increased. I worked with Jo for many months after this, and the ongoing differentiation of their product resulted in winning business against competitors with far bigger feature sets.
How to question uncertainty
It is not difficult to question assumptions. There are four parts to questioning uncertainty:
Context
Optimistic assertion
Risky assumption
Next action
Step one is to set the context. This can simply be stating an assumption or hypothesis, e.g. “We believe users struggle with filling in this email template”. But we don't state any suggested solution.
Step two is to challenge with optimism, such as “So what would need to be true to make this email template 10x easier to fill in?”. This approach avoids assuming problems with the proposed solutions and keeps options wide open. It is a bad habit to challenge with problems. Sometimes, it will work better, but typically, focusing on how things can be better will yield more valuable findings than searching for fixes to problems.
At this stage, your questioning may have uncovered areas that need better understanding. If so, skip step 3 and jump straight to the next action.
If there is no missing understanding or uncertainty, then step 3 is to ask what could go wrong or might have been missed. Capturing these risky assumptions may discover a clear learning need.
Step 4 is to agree on a learning goal to increase the chances of success, guiding the team with what experiment they may implement.
Experiments might be no code, and they might be releases. Shaping every release as an experiment will increase the focus on learning.
Is this needed?
The power of questions is what drives all scientific breakthroughs. At its heart, the scientific method focuses on a hypothesis presented for people to prove wrong with evidence obtained from experiments. Learning in a product landscape does not deserve the same rigour as science experiments.
Testing and learning have shown to be a highly effective method of problem-solving. Given the same challenge to build the tallest spaghetti tower to hold a marshmallow, 6-year-olds constantly outperform MBAs and CEOs. The findings suggest that 6-year-olds experiment a lot faster and thus find a working solution quicker. In his TED talk, Tom Wujec shares his experience where the kids communicate more concisely and quickly, are not afraid of failing, and have little ego. He points out that the kids do not argue about who the “CEO of Spaghetti Towers” is.
If you can increase curiosity and encourage questioning the status quo, you are on the way to learning what matters to customers.
Common mistakes
The habit of questioning uncertainties looks pretty easy, and it is definitely not rocket science. However, it is easy for leaders to ask questions but fail to encourage learning.
You must make it a safe space to learn, so you must embrace failure, not punish it.
For some leaders, it is difficult to admit when you don’t know something. However, leading by example means you must make it acceptable not to have the answers.
Recognise that the assumptions are not facts. When leadership express assumptions as infallible, it makes it very hard for team members to challenge.
Plans are not set in concrete. There must be space for the roadmap to flex based on learnings.
Top tips to getting started
Here are a few easy tips to help you create a bigger impact of questioning uncertainties:
Celebrate learnings when individuals capture evidence.
Share learnings (with credit).
Increase your face time with product teams, including engineers, to discuss learnings.
Make learning an objective.
To get started, practice asking these questions in 1:1 sessions. It’s typically easier. Then, consider which regular meetings would be good for you to question uncertainties. Prepare relevant optimistic assertions to drive your questions.
Finally, when will you start questioning uncertainties?
Further learning
Tom Wujec TED talk is a fun and enlightening watch.
There are related articles on my blog at RightToLeft “Embracing evidence sharing in product management.
You might enjoy this HBR article on the broader topic of the power of questions for leadership.
If you want more help, you can find out about product leader coaching with me at my website www.righttoleft.co.uk.