Join 📚 Felicity's Weekly Book Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Felicity's read, .
I realized there’s an underlying structure to discovery that we can use to guide our work. It starts with defining a clear outcome—one that sets the scope for discovery. From there, we must discover and map out the opportunity space—this is what gives structure to the ill-structured problem of reaching our desired outcome. It’s the all-important problem framing that opens up the solution space. And finally, we need to discover the solutions that will address those opportunities and thus drive our desired outcome. It sounds simple, but this structure helps us know what to do when. I encourage teams to visualize it using an opportunity solution tree (OST).
Continuous Discovery Habits
Teresa Torres
*Staff Engineer* introduces an approach I call [Take five, then synthesize](https://lethain.us20.list-manage.com/track/click?u=f7003ed301623a88fab7cf783&id=1e5e9d0544&e=a102c6f471), which does strategy by:
1. Documenting how five current and historical related decisions have been made in your organization. This is an extended exploration phase
2. Synthesizing those five documents into a diagnosis and policy. You are naming the implicit strategy, so it’s impossible for someone to reasonably argue you’re not empowered to do strategy: you’re just describing what’s already happening
Who Gets to Do Strategy? @ Irrational Exuberance
Will Larson
At the end of the day, roadmaps are a communication tool. To figure out which ones are right for your company, think about your audience and what they need to know: Product development teams: These are generally highly detailed, require commitments from engineering by quarter, discovery and delivery status, and are usually a quarter in length. Sales teams: Sales teams need fewer details. They need bigger-picture items that address problems and rough timeline on releases (either quarterly or half year). This is where the narrative/value proposition for each feature to customers is important to include as well. Leadership: These roadmaps focus on the “initiative to strategic intent” layer. They’re used to talking about dependencies and capacity planning, and follow quarterly timelines.
Product Operations
Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise