Product Discovery talks

Product discovery is the work a team does to decide what to build before committing to building it. It means understanding the people a product is for, the problems they actually have and the context they live in, then testing possible solutions cheaply enough that a wrong idea can be dropped before it becomes expensive.

For product and design teams, discovery is the main defence against building the wrong thing well. Many failed products were carefully designed and well engineered, but solved a problem nobody had or misunderstood how people would use them. Regular contact with users, and a habit of treating ideas as assumptions to check, keep a team’s decisions grounded.

The talks here cover four connected sub-topics. Discovery itself is the subject of talks such as Tomer Sharon’s Perfectly executing the wrong plan and Anders Toxboe’s Experiment to innovate. User research runs through David Travis’s The 7 deadly sins of user research, Christine Perfetti on evaluating and improving designs, Tomer Sharon on experience sampling, and Karl Gills on basing A/B tests on user research. Interviewing is addressed in Moishe Lettvin’s What I Learned Doing 250 Interviews at Google, and prototyping in Tom Chi’s Rapid Prototyping & Product Management and Stephen Anderson’s Role-Playing the Interaction.

Several talks focus on empathy and context: Tania Douglas argues that better tech starts with understanding context, Johannes Ippen asks why UX is a problem in Humans, not Users, Aaron Gustafson talks about designing with empathy, and Kelly Goto maps emotion to experience. Jeff Gothelf shares what he has learned from five years of Lean UX, Julie Zhuo explains how a Facebook designer thinks, and R.A. Mashelkar looks at breakthrough designs for ultra-low-cost products. The recordings span 2009 to 2019 and come from events including TED, Google I/O, UX Poland, Mind the Product and GOTO.

The collection also includes three widely recommended talks on modern product practice: Teresa Torres’s Introduction to Modern Product Discovery and Melissa Perri’s Escaping the Build Trap, both from Productized, and Marty Cagan on the root causes of product failure at Mind the Product San Francisco.