Searching for value

An important part of product development is searching for value. I specifically choose the word searching rather than the word producing that many frequently use for the following reasons:

• Producing imply a linear approach for many, searching implies less linearity. The concept that value discovery is linear is behind many bad habits such as working harder instead of smarter.
• Searching is more focused on what we want than producing which is more focused on what we do, and focusing on outcome rather than output is an important strategy.
• Searching gives an understanding that you can fail or succeed where producing hints that value is inevitable, this will increase the effort to question your methods.
• As a task, searching is more open and active than producing and usage of words and communication is an important part of the culture.
• Control is difficult, you don't decide that there will be value, you need to discover it by actively searching. During tough times a team must remember that some things are not in their control.

When developing products, digital products specifically this is critical. There are activities you can do to increase the speed at which you can search for and find value. There are also activities you can do to increase the speed at which you can apply and leverage the value you found.

The two cornerstones is to have platforms to experiment on and to have tools to evaluate the experiments. Experimentation should be continuous because it avoids stagnation from exploiting bad options, you can never know you've found the best option only that you are exploiting the best option you've found so far. A key aspect of experimentation is that numbers matter a lot, if you need to prioritize in some way a very good strategy is to try to do more experiments faster rather than fewer and better experiments. A logic behind this is if you aim for many experiments you will find ways to automate and help in the creation and evaluation of experiments, and leveraging computers has proven very effective and efficient for this.

If you are skilled in separating good activities from bad you will have information on how to choose which value you will try to get. A very good strategy here is to have multiple parallel tracks of value exploiting going on at the same time. Even for a small product team having several tracks bring great value by reducing the pressure for any specific track to be "the one" that always delivers, this is healthy for anybody working in the team. It is also good to remember that a value track may suddenly exhaust its potential or become impossible for reasons impossible to foresee, or the other way around, the track that look fairly good suddenly being critical.

A very dangerous way of working is to be overly optimistic to make additions to the product, a supportive mindset in the team is important and everybody should encourage everybody to experiment in new ways. But remember to always make sure that there is solid data first before spending more effort than absolutely necessary to understand how much value can be extracted. Discussions, expert point of views and gut feeling are not worthless but spend it on figuring out how to best exploit proven value.

As time elapse more and more of the obvious and simple experiments have been performed. It will be tempting to make increasingly bigger investments to find new value. However since discovery of value isn't caused by the effort you put into your experiments this should be avoided at all cost. If ideas for experiments seem to run out it's will likely be more efficient to broaden the search area than trying to look harder. If in doubt about the economics in your specific area it is a good strategy to try a bit of both a few times to make sure that you can properly assess the effectiveness and efficiency of the different methods you have at your disposal.