In today’s Agile Atelier podcast episode, I am chatting with Product Management coach and consultant Tim Herbig. Before going independent, Tim was the Director of Product for the Enterprise-level A/B Testing tool iridion. Tim is also a published author of the book Lateral Leadership. Tim’s workshops, talks and online courses are a result of 10+ years in product management. He doesn’t believe that the number of written user stories or shipped products can tell you anything about his work (or the work of your team). Tim is on a mission to change people’s behavior in a way which is beneficial for the business – both theirs and the company that they work for.
In this episode, Tim and I explore the topic of Product Discovery, starting with what it means in different contexts and breaking Discovery down into different phases or steps that Tim recommends. We move on to discussing some anti-patterns, what listeners can do to apply Discovery approaches and techniques, regardless of the context that they find themselves in, and the different types of measures that one can use. We also talk about the different roles within Discovery, how a classic Design Sprint fits into the process, how much of Discovery depends on the product being built, and finally we touch on the topic of Dual Track Agile.
Tim does an excellent job sharing his real-world experience and building in analogies in our chat so that the listeners can take tangible next steps in order to move from theory to practice. If you’re involved in building a product, especially a tech product, you will find this episode quite useful. You can connect with Tim on LinkedIn, Twitter, and his website. To learn more about this topic, you can check out Tim’s Product Discovery site for this episode, as well as Tim’s Product Discovery Approach course.
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Stakeholders don’t really know what they want but the easiest way for them to express it is in the form of a solution, which they have heard [about] or seen a competitor recently release. Talking about those specific solutions is the easiest way for them to express to you as the product team, what you should be doing. Your role as a product team is to ensure that there’s enough clarity around the problem space behind the solution.
TIM HERBIG ON THE AGILE ATELIER PODCAST
Rahul Bhattacharya 
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