Balancing Discovery and Delivery for Outstanding Product Development

Understanding the Challenges of Balancing Discovery and Delivery

Discovery and delivery are two essential aspects of product development that must be balanced to create outstanding products. Discovery focuses on understanding end-users’ problems and uncovering opportunities to create business outcomes, involving user research, problem framing, and experimentation. On the other hand, delivery is about producing what creates value. Both are continuous and overlap, with discovery enabling meaningful delivery and delivery creating evidence for a clearer understanding of the problem.

Achieving a Sustainable Balance between Discovery and Delivery

To achieve a sustainable balance between discovery and delivery, teams should avoid treating them as distinct phases or assigning them to different teams. Instead, the product team should be responsible for both discovery and delivery, with end-to-end responsibilities that enable a change of direction whenever necessary.

# Example of a team structure with shared responsibilities
team_structure = {
    'discovery_team': {
        'responsibilities': ['user_research', 'problem_framing', 'experimentation'],
        'time_allocation': {'discovery': 0.8, 'delivery': 0.2}
    },
    'delivery_team': {
        'responsibilities': ['building_solutions'],
        'time_allocation': {'discovery': 0.2, 'delivery': 0.8}
    }
}

Best Practices for Balancing Discovery and Delivery

• Have part of the team invest 80% of their time in discovery and 20% in delivery.
• The other part of the team should focus on delivery but understand the problem space to build valuable solutions.
• Share a common goal and ideate on the future together.
• Make informed decisions on what to pursue and what to drop.
• Measure value created from released features.

Conclusion

Mastering both discovery and delivery is essential for creating outstanding products. By being curious and humble, and by working relentlessly to solve problems, teams can create state-of-the-art solutions that drive value for both customers and businesses.