Product discovery wins back time & trust

I spent 14 months debating with my stakeholder which features to build. It was exhausting. I resented him for all the lost time going back & forth. But I was guilty too.

I lacked a better, faster way to discover the right solution. I was ready to concede - I'd given in. I was ready to let my team build what that stakeholder wanted. Then lightning struck.

I remembered learning about 1-week Design Sprints a couple of months earlier. I had written them off right away...

I came from the corporate consulting world. Big bloated delivery teams spent months running agile sprints to build intricate MVPs. What good could come from us spending 1 week? But I was at the end of my rope with this particular project.

Without much left to lose, I promised the stakeholder a path forward. I proposed, "Give me a few days of your single focus, and we'll figure out, together, what to build." And wouldn't you know, it worked.

Within one week, we pivoted from the core problem we planned to solve, to an adjacent one that was more important to our customers.

We also became crystal clear on the solution our customers needed us to build. To our surprise, only 2 of 30+ the features that we had argued over were important to them. Imagine if we had followed our own "expertise."

We also stopped arguing and felt aligned on a common cause.

We left that sprint trusting one another. We developed unwavering confidence in the solutions we crafted together.

And for me... I was sold on design sprints. I could replace 14 months of nitpicking unfounded solutions with 1 week of customer-centered solutioning...

Why would I ever do anything differently?

Turns out, 70 design sprints later, I haven't.