When you're clutching a roadmap, you don't feel lost – even if you are.

Thread about a tiny intervention that joins up discovery and delivery for #productdesign and #ProductManagement people who want to get ... unlost.

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In the beginning, you had an idea, a hunch: this will be IT.

This will be the thing that cracks it for us.

You've been designing and building, building and desiging.

Now you feel a creeping uncertainty ... what if this isn't the thing?

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Of course, you started — as most teams do — with a great idea for a feature or product.

You just know there's a need for this. You just know it's valuable.

So your team scoped out the work and laid out the roadmap.

And you jumped in and started.

3/9

Now it's a few months since you started.

The initiative is taking shape, awesome.

But you're starting to wonder ... is the need *really* there? Is it *really* valuable? Was our hunch *really* right?

You've still got the roadmap, but you feel BLINDFOLDED.

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Perhaps you've recruited folks to do some user testing with prototypes. Perhaps you've spoken with some customers.

You've made some incremental improvements.

Perhaps in the back of your head you once thought “gah, listening to users is overrated!”

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Yet still ... that feeling of uncertainty has crept in.

You don't want to admit it, but it's niggling away.

What if you've spent all this time and energy on something that wasn't as good as you all hoped?

No, that's too horrible to contemplate.

But what if?

6/9

We mostly know that every product roadmap is just a guess, a bet.

But often teams don’t act that way – they act as if now all they need to do is deliver on the plan.

By the time we find out the guess was wrong, we could've made a better bet, it's too late: we're all-in.

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When teams can see a roadmap laid out, suddenly it doesn't feel like we need discovery any more.

It looks like we've done the discovery. Now we just follow the map and go on the planned journey.

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So I was very excited to stumble on a tiny intervention that seems to help turn all our delivery work into discovery work.

One that aligns the needs of the business and the needs of the builders.

I'm putting together a piece about it.

LMK if you're interested.

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