If you want to run a great discovery process, you need to consider how to get the findings across to your team. This post shares 3 tactics to ensure teammates at every level are aligned and ready to move forward with your discovery insights.

As much the how as the what

Customer Discovery and Product Discovery are important parts of the Product Management toolkit, allowing PMs to develop key insights that drive the product vision and roadmap.

What makes these processes effective is not only the quality of insights collected but also the extent to which the broader team is brought along to agree with the findings. This second part can be especially important when the findings contradict some of the preconceived notions of the founders or leaders.

How can you ensure your team is aligned with your discovery findings? Let’s take a look at three tactics that have helped me achieve this in my discovery processes.

Involve the team in interviews

It should go without saying that when a person sees and hears something first-hand, they gain a much deeper appreciation for the insights than they otherwise would.

Because of this, I like to include teammates throughout the discovery process. I aim to have participation from a broad cross-section of people who will be responsible for supporting the results of the process.

Ideally, your product discovery team is T-shaped. There will be deep involvement from a core team of the PM and 1-3 additional teammates, and limited involvement from broader team who will typically each join for just one or two interviews:

• The core team is responsible for driving the discovery process to completion and doing all the required legwork. This includes creating the interview plan, interview guide, and any mockups, demos, or other assets required for conducting the interviews. They are also the ones who facilitate and participate in debriefs, summarize key findings, and share notes with the broader team. Depending on the situation, this core team will often draw from roles such as: PM, User Researcher, Designer, Tech Lead, and Founder.
• The broader team is there to hear insights first-hand and to have an opportunity to make an imprint on the process with their questions and suggestions. After ironing the kinks out of the process in the first few interviews, I try to invite one outside teammate to each customer interview. They can participate by contributing to our shared notes document during the call, asking their own questions (when prompted), and participating in the post-interview debrief. It’s great to include founders, engineers, designers, and other PMs in your interviews, but you can just as well invite teammates from anywhere in your company.

When I joined Moss in their pre-product stage, it was important for me to develop a strong understanding of our target customer to shape our product direction. Additionally, it was important for our founder who was leading Sales to understand how our target customer talked about their pain points and our potential solutions. So we partnered to become the core team for a discovery process that led us to speak with over 100 potential customers. Since we worked side-by-side in this process, we were of course incredibly aligned. And since we involved the other Founders, PMs, Engineers, and teammates from other roles in our broader team, everyone had a chance to get closer to our potential customer throughout the process.

Record and share your calls

More and more companies are predominantly conducting their customer research over video calls. While in-person interviews absolutely have their place, the convenience and efficiency of video makes it the most reached for tool in my interview toolkit.

This format provides the added benefit of making it easy to record the calls (after gaining permission from the customer of course). Using a tool like Dovetail which transcribes interviews and makes it easier to annotate, you can focus more on the interview and less on note taking, and you can later revisit parts of the interview when your memory is hazy.

But interview recordings do more than just save the interviewer time. They also offer more compelling ways of sharing findings with teammates who couldn’t participate in the interviews.

Let’s say you’re at the end of your discovery process and you want to convey one of the main insights to your other teammates. Which of these two statements would be more powerful:

1. Customers are annoyed that they manually need to close their in-app tasks because we don’t automatically close them when the tasks are completed.