Читать книгу EMPOWERED - Marty Cagan - Страница 15

If you have not yet read INSPIRED, then you might be wondering: What is so wrong with the business owners and stakeholders deciding what goes on the roadmap, and therefore what the engineers should build?

This is considered the first and most important principle of product discovery: our customers, and our stakeholders, aren't able to tell us what to build.

It's not because our customers or stakeholders aren't smart or knowledgeable.

There are two fundamental reasons why our customers and stakeholders aren't able to tell us what to build:

First, the customers and stakeholders don't know what is just now possible—they are not experts in the enabling technologies, so they can't be expected to know the best way to solve the problems we're focused on, or even if the problem is possible to solve. It's often the case that innovations solve problems in ways that customers and stakeholders had no idea was possible.

Second, with technology products, it's very hard to predict in advance what solutions will work. There are many reasons why product ideas don't deliver the results we hoped. All too often we are excited about some idea, but our customers are not, so they don't buy what we thought they would. Or, we discover the idea has major privacy or security issues. Or we find out the idea will take much longer to build than anyone expected.

Empowered product teams understand these inherent issues, and product discovery is about discovering a solution that our customers love, yet works for our business.

We refer to this as product discovery to acknowledge that we understand what we can't know in advance, and to emphasize that our task is to discover a solution that is valuable, usable, feasible, and viable.