DISCO part 1 - Discovery
Over the years I’ve had the pleasure of working with many different teams, using agile techniques and practices to build products and deliver a wide range of different services.
Some have been wildly successful, driving companies up the stock market and leading to them being acquired for large sums of money. Others have failed, resulting in lay-offs and millions of dollars wasted.
There’s been a common thread that I’ve noticed throughout all this. While collaborating, facilitating, and guiding these teams through their journeys, I’ve noticed a number of key elements that combine to enhance their chances of being successful.
This has led me to define the DISCO model. The DISCO model covers five key core areas, and is designed to help teams succeed with solving complex challenges. Those areas are:
Discovery
Iterate
Ship
Celebrate
Observe
The most successful teams and enterprises I’ve worked with do well in each of these important areas. In this newsletter I’m going to share some insight into this model, discuss how it walks, and start walking you through each of the core areas.
Let’s have a look at Discovery.
Discovery
Great teams take time to understand problems. They conduct user research and interviews to reveal pain points, emotional triggers, and annoyances of their targeted end users. They explore new markets, uncovering friction points and gaps, which lead to opportunities for innovation.
They explore. They discover.
And the key in the Discovery phase is to resist jumping to conclusions. It’s also crucial to avoid the HiPPO effect—where the Highest Paid Person's Opinion is taken as gospel because of their position, rather than relying on the evidence. We often fall into this trap where we expect those senior and highly paid people, our leaders, to have all the answers.
Instead, we need to be more aware of our own biases, and our tendency as human beings to jump into early solutionizing.
It’s hard to resist—but it’s important.
HiPPO solutions
Instead, harness the collective power and intelligence of your teams for discovery and ideation. Use feedback from their research and other information sources to nurture a culture of data driven decision making.
For every problem there may be a thousand solutions, some with unintended consequences. And often, the first solution is rarely the best. So it’s important to give your teams time to explore.
A good guiding principle is to give your team’s problems to attack first, from which they can then jump into discovery and come up with options, rather than working to fixed, pre-baked solutions.
Encourage your teams to take a step back. Look at the bigger picture first. Do research and, based on what is learnt, prioritise and move forward until more feedback is gained.
A real world example of this took place in 2018, during a large modernisation program at a major financial institution. We were tasked with delivering a sleek new customer experience and building automated processes on top of the existing core banking system, which was running on a mainframe technology. When it came to looking at the backend, we were planning to build that out in a similar tech stack. It seemed tricky, as the the processes were rather complex. Estimates were coming in at around six months to build—and that was at a bare minimum. The reality was looking like taking a lot longer.
Part of the team had been undertaking a period of discovery and asking the end users of these backend systems what pain points they had, and what they wanted to see in a final product. The overwhelming feedback was that they were happy with the existing system, but there were a few areas that could still be improved.
So armed with this information we pivoted, and instead looked at what it would take to integrate into the existing backend systems. This turned out to be a lot simpler.
It was one of those situations that was obvious in hindsight. But without this discovery work, we would have missed it completely. That’s the value of Discovery: you uncover information early on, no matter how obvious it seems once you’ve found it.
Once your requirements are clear and you have the problem clearly defined, you begin to understand the What.
The next thing to discover is the How.
There’s another form of discovery that you can apply here: technical spikes.
Technical spikes can help you better understand the approach to implement your ideas and solutions. These are timeboxed periods, typically between a couple of hours to a couple of days, where a team can take a deep dive and explore the technical unknowns. This could be understanding the current system and codebase, looking at new tech stacks being proposed for usage, building a quick PoC (proof of concept), or checking the integration points and access privilege required.
By setting out distinct time allotments for tech spikes, the team can quickly report back on effort, options, and what is—or isn’t—possible. This provides an excellent learning opportunity, and helps to build confidence and de-risk deliveries.
Without tech spikes, your technical teams might otherwise find it impossible to commit or estimate with any level of accuracy, as there may be too many unknowns. You’re far better off getting the team started and exploring the technical landscape first. Estimating in detail when so much is unknown is a folly, and wastes time and demotivates those involved early on. Sadly, this is something that enterprises new to agile still force their teams to do, often due to misguided processes or poorly set up contracts.
Instead, it’s vital to make the most of the period when the teams’ passion and interest is at its highest. Set them off on a rapid paced exploration and see what comes back.
Different Types of Value
Early on you pay to learn, and the value you gain from this is knowledge. This knowledge helps reduce risk in a number of ways, including:
More certainty on what’s valuable;
Knowing what is and isn't possible; and
A better ability to estimate effort.
Of all the areas in DISCO, Discovery drives the biggest benefit. If you pick the right problems to solve, and you’re able to validate and de-risk the implementation, then you will always be ahead of the game.
The most successful teams I’ve worked with have built in dedicated discovery time, enabling them to explore problem spaces and engage in customer research. Having an adequate amount of time set aside results in a richness of information gleaned which can drive innovation for years to come. Multiple opportunities are uncovered. Larger, more strategic problems become apparent. And leaders are able to use this to orientate, which gives them more confidence in which direction to take.
Over to you
I hope you’ve enjoyed this little bite-sized chunk of Discovery, and I’ve piqued your interest as to how the DISCO model works. In my next installment we’ll be exploring the many ways to Iterate, and how to do this effectively.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you about your tips, or how Discovery helped your teams uncover something surprising.
If you’d like to learn more about Discovery, then check out our Successful Product Owner certified training or deep dive as part of the Enterprise Agility: Patterns and Practices course.
Next addition of the newsletter. My first post on #DISCO, the key ingredient for enabling successful teams and product development. Hope you enjoy the content, and as always, I'd love to hear your ideas and feedback.