What's up friends! Hope ya'll enjoyed reading UX Strategy! Hoping to catch some of you during the summary on Thursday! (at 7pm CEST) This month, we're going to jump on the latest book from Marty Cagan - Transformed. This book only dropped a couple of weeks ago, and is already getting solid reviews. The book explores how to shift product orgs over to the 'Product Operating Model', raising the awareness of the increasing need for Product Coaching in modern product orgs. I loved reading Empowered at the end of last year, so I'm confident this'll be a worthwhile read too. _________________________ What’s Product Bookclub? _________________________ It's an online bookclub for the members of Product Synthesis - each month I’ll announce a new Product book that I’ll be reading throughout the month, and anyone in the community is welcome to read (or listen) along with me! If you’re like me, and love reading, but don’t have enough people to discuss what you’re learning, then this’ll be perfect for you! We’ll do a mid-way check-in call to discuss our findings on the 18th of March at 14:30 CEST, and then I’ll do a live summary where we’ll go deep on the entire book on the 2nd of April at 7pm CEST to discuss and reflect on what we’ve learned together. You’ll find the calls scheduled in the Calendar, I’m looking forward to seeing some of you there soon! And, If you’ve got any questions - just drop ‘em below! Cheers, David

You might have spotted a bit of the shade being thrown in Teresa Torres' / Product Discovery's direction on LinkedIn over the last week. I'm not going to wade into those murky waters on LinkedIn (for now), but feels like fair game in our little community! If you're out of the loop - the main criticism is that Product Discovery is too focused on moving fast to reduce risk - instead of more typical UX/CX research where you take time to draw conclusions and discover the truth. It's basically a discussion on the 'depth' of the research. This is a fairly common criticism of Product Discovery as an approach, and unsurprisingly it's usually coming from UX Design & Researcher (who might be more than a little biased). I'm not going to get into the pros and cons of each approach, because it's not a case of which is better and worse. Instead, I'm going to talk about the reason people are salty about Product Discovery - Perceived Value. The perceived value of 'typical' UX research is low. It's seen as time consuming, it doesn't fit comfortably into most product development cycle, and generally the outcomes of research don't give clear direction to the team. When teams are calculating if the time spent is worth the results they'll get, more often than not they'll choose to simply skip UX research to save time. Across my 12 years as a UX Designer this was ALWAYS the challenge when it came to getting research into the process, and it is still a major challenge in design teams today. Product Discovery on the other hand is a response to the perceived value of UX Research. It's leaner, more accessible, more collaborative and has a clear purpose of driving business and product outcomes in a customer centric way. The reason people are salty about Product Discovery taking off is simple, it's because it challenges their notion of what is valuable, and it's being adopted much more quickly than UX research ever was. I say all this as someone who's spun up multiple research labs over the years, done thousands of usability tests, run dozen of Design Sprints, and has always been a strong advocate for more research in Product.

Hi everyone, if you missed the live recording of the bookclub summary, the recording is now available in the classroom. It's the first full summary, so it might it's a little rough around the edges, but I hope you all find it useful. Feel free to drop any feedback or thoughts over in a DM, or in this thread if you prefer! And, incase you've missed the calendar we've got this month's bookclub Check-in on the 18th of Jan @ 3pm CET, this is just a chance for us to get together and share our thoughts on this month's bookclub book. Then, we've got the bookclub summary coming up at 7pm CET, where I'll be running through my summary of the book live.

Thanks David for the thorough breakdown of the book. I'm looking for the video to catch up on stuff I missed.

I had a whole week for reading the book. I didn't even open it. What happened? Like newly awakened patient after a coma I now have three days to finish the book. better get started. 😅😱