The product workers: reconciling product discovery and delivery

Product Discovery is intended to help identify product risks in complex problems at an early stage. In addition, solutions should be found that are valued and usable by users, while they can be built and operated economically as a team. Therefore, continuous product discovery and delivery should go hand in hand.

If that sounds too theoretical, you can listen to the very practical problem presented by Konstantin Diener and his colleagues at cosee. In a very short time, it was necessary to translate a physical product experience such as the Essen board game trade fair SPIEL into a digital, pandemic-friendly form that had to be equally successful for visitors and trade fair organizers.

In an interview with Tim Klein, Konstantin Diener provides a lively report on how they managed to do this by closely interlinking product discovery and delivery. Obviously, in this tight time frame, the team simply would not have had time for an upstream discovery or analysis phase. So the problem became a solution: ultra-short cycles and continuous user feedback led to a very well-functioning SPIEL.digital trade fair.

Interested parties can find details on the project discussed, the creation of SPIEL.digital, on the cosee website. There is a field report on the company’s home office experience in the cosee blog.

Konstantin cites the following sources in the conversation:

• Teresa Torres: Continuous Discovery Habits
• Gojko Adzic: Specification by Example
• Julia Grace from Slack: Talk about Clarity

This episode is also closely related to the following Product Worker episodes related to Product Discovery:

• Integrating Product Discovery into Scrum (with Juliana Brell)
• Establish continuous product discovery in teams (with Jan Kiekeben)
• Outcome Goals and Product Discovery (with Tim Herbig)

The episode and further information can be found under “Die Produktwerker: Discovery and Delivery in one game”.