I believe strongly that there will be a sea change in how product development work gets done in the next several years. I'm fulling aware of the risks of making predictions, but I'd like to:
Spark some discussion
Inspire so entrepreneuers
send a warning to PMs doing things the traditional way
I plan to do this in a series of posts. In this one, I’ll simply set up the scenario I imagine and focus on a common product activity: product discovery.
Introducing Mindease
Mindease Health has been a provider of support for people with mental health issues for over 20 years. They started providing guidance and coaching to people remotely by phone and, during the pandemic, made the big jump to remote online sessions. Their biggest expense is the professionals they need to deliver their services. It’s now June 2030 and leadership feels that AI technologies have matured to the point that most services can be delivered in an automated fashion, engaging human contacts in exceptional circumstances, e.g., if a life-threatening crisis is detected.
After a few brainstorming sessions with subject matter experts, including market analysts, leadership is convinced that using AI in this capacity will significantly improve the value delivered to their customers and be affordable to a larger segment of people while also lowering costs (and thus increasing profitability). They throw the term “win/win” around quite a bit (they’re execs after all!).
Leadership calls a meeting with one of their Senior PMs, Isaac Vomisa, describing their thinking and asking him to turn over his current tasks to the rest of the PM team and get cracking on product discovery for their idea. They code name the project “Stella”. Isaac’s executive sponsor will be Vada Bennett, the Chief Product Officer.
Product Discovery
In this series, we define product discovery as a set of activities designed to gather the evidence necessary to decide whether to develop the product (evaluate and derisk this big financial bet). It starts with a trigger, like an idea from leadership, and ends when a development decision has been made yea or nay.
Clearing the Decks
Isaac switches to his email/task management client and asks it to suggest which of his tasks can be easily offloaded and to whom. It generates a draft email to the team describing his new priorities and individual emails to each team member outlining the tasks they’ll take over and providing links to important related resources.
Just like that Isaac is ready to start discovery.
In the next installment, we’ll describe the process Isaac will follow and the software tools that will turn what used to be weeks or months of work into a few days.
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