High Impact Discovery with Scott Colfer (Herd Consulting)

Andrew Welcome to byProduct Live where we unbox everything SaaS and product. We talk with experts and leaders in SaaS and product to understand their approach to leadership and ways of working to share their knowledge and understanding. Andrew Maeer Joining us today on the byProduct podcast is Scott Colfer, Director of Product at Herd Consulting. Scott is an experienced product leader with coming up to 20 years experience working across different domains.

His most recent experience has been transitioning public sector organizations to a more product-centric approach. He held a number of roles at the Ministry of Justice, which culminated in being head of their user-centered professions and service standards. before being Chief Product Officer at Westminster Council. Herd are a Product and Business Analysis Consultancy, where Scott is Director of Product, and they're experts in discovery and recovery, and this is where our talk today will take us.

The critical phase of product discovery and the high impact this can have on an organization. Scott founded and leads a network for product leaders, and in his spare time he enjoys sauna, weightlifting, cycling. and like a lot of us spends too much money eating out. He's also just printed a book called New Wave Product, which is a manifesto for pragmatic product management.

Welcome to the show, Scott. How are you today? Scott Good, thank you very much. Looking forward to having a chat.

Andrew Maeer Yep, great stuff. to kick things off, why don't you just give us a quick rundown on the work that you guys do at Herd and where you specialize. Scott Yeah, so just talking about it personally, think the reason I really like what we do at herd is none of us were consultants before, so we're a consultancy. None of us were consultants before.

We've all experienced consultancies and what we've tried. Yeah, do you know what I mean? We've been on the other side and and that's the thing that we bring into it is all of us have put our time and effort into building the consultancy we wanted to have access to when we were. Andrew Maeer See you out in real world.

Scott in-house. So that's the general background to it. A bit more official and specific. You mentioned already some of stuff we do.

So we really specialize in discovery, recovery and delivery. That's how we help clients. what we do, the specialist skills we have are product management, business analysis and delivery management. So we bring those things together to give what we think is Andrew Maeer Okay.

Scott great consultancy experience but without some of the consultancy vibes they might have got in the past. Andrew Maeer Yeah, cool. So what we're going to talk about today is the importance around the discovery phase. So that very early stage when you're working on a new project and with a new customer.

So what are the key areas that discovery really focuses on for you that are super important? Scott Yeah, guess discovery is just a means to an end. And a bit of an issue is it's become a bit of a cottage industry sometimes. So I quite like talking about the so what of it.

And normally what clients need, what people need is two things. It's either growth opportunities. So we need to grow what we do, either an individual product line or the organization as a whole. And or operation efficiencies.

We've got a Andrew Maeer Okay. Scott drive down our unit costs, we've got to do what we're doing, but better, cheaper and leaner. And we always try and make sure that discovery isn't a means to an end, isn't a cottage industry. It is just a way of helping with those two things as pragmatically and efficiently as possible.

Andrew Maeer Okay, cool. And think then wrapped up in those two things, the key thing that I think you're looking for is around finding that first best opportunity and understanding how that obviously fits into those two areas. Scott Yeah, what we've heard is loads of people hate the phrase discovery. You almost get like a visceral reaction from folks nowadays because they're used to it kind of being on rails a bit.

So we do this thing, it takes this long, don't really do anything until we get to the end, that kind of stuff, which you can call analysis paralysis. Discovery comes from a world where you were trying to take a leap of faith and just test it. Andrew Maeer Yeah. Scott do it small, learn and move on.

And that's the thing we're trying to bring back is quite often we'll find a first best opportunity to do something. And actually there's enough there to try something out. We can carry on the overall discovery, but we can just start doing something the first time we find something that looks good. Andrew Maeer Yeah, okay cool and if we talk a little bit more about, so when we're looking at kind of growth opportunities, what are the kind of key things that businesses are, you're trying to find out when you're talking to businesses in that area.

Scott I think it's kind of two things. One is they quite often have great ideas internally already. And they need what they lack is not the capability they've already thought about, it's capacity. So one thing we're trying to find is how do we find and amplify the first best idea you're holding onto already?

Quite often people don't need to outsource their thinking. What they need to outsource is somebody to help them bring it to life. So that's thing one. thing too is what I keep seeing, what we keep seeing as a whole is those growth opportunities, it's kind of goodwill and good luck as to whether they're found and picked up.

I've not found an organization, I've been chatting about this with folks the last year, I've not found one that clearly kind of coordinates all of their growth opportunities in the central place, really push through the one at a time that is the best fit for their company's goal at the time. So We're often trying to do two things. We're trying to like visualize really quickly the opportunities they've got. Fill in any gaps.

But we're also trying to figure out how can you just do this in a long lived way? I think the other thing is quite often if companies do get help, they might bring in like a UX agency, for example. UX agencies are great. They will do fantastic work and they will help you to uncover customer needs.

But I've not really heard of a company that said our board heard a single unmet customer need and then gave us all the money we wanted. And so the other thing we're trying to do is alongside helping them to identify the biggest pain points for customers, it's helping them to do kind of market analysis as well. So what your competitors doing, if you're looking to exit in a few years, who's buying and what are they buying? What's the gap analysis in that space?

So market analysis, I think, can often be missing. You need to filter your opportunities through that as well. And the other thing, going back to the board, is helping with that storytelling internally. Quite often, no matter how great this 20 page report is, it comes down to a room with some actual human beings in it.

We're all emotional. We're all irrational. You need to be able to land it in an emotionally true Andrew Maeer Yeah. Scott way in that room and negotiate a decision to act on it.

And that's the thing we keep seeing is nowadays relatively straightforward to spot those pain points. Companies are quite good at that, up to very good at that. It's really how do you actually sit that in the broader market and how do you actually, to your senior leadership team, executive leadership team, potentially to your board, potentially to your investors, tell the powerful, simple story about what the value of this opportunity is. Andrew Maeer Yeah, absolutely.

we kind of the next topic of conversation was obviously the how of if we've done the what is it, but if we think about the how of effective discovery. So what are the key things when you're working on a new project? Obviously, it's invariably I'm guessing with a new customer, what are the kind of key things that you've outlined that make effective discovery? Scott So like I said, being really explicit about splitting up those tracks of work and saying that they all need to happen together and building a team that isn't just geared towards kind of UX and understanding pain points, but can do that kind of broad analysis, that storytelling and pitching as well is really important.

The way we generally do it is starting off with a big bank of opportunities. It used to be the case that people would fall in love with solutions, know, 2000s, 2010s, that was the big thing to avoid. Nowadays, the next issue is falling in love with a problem. So you just find one customer pain point and then a team or an organization just gets behind that.

So the critical thing we do is start with a bank of opportunities. We map out multiple opportunities so we can be agnostic to the specific pain point that we actually Andrew Maeer Okay. Scott light on, know, the first best opportunity. We just pull them across from that bank.

See, does it really fit with customers? Does it fit with what we can actually do as an organization? Does it fit in the marketplace? Does it fit with our board?

Does it fit with our SLT, ELT, etc.? The first time it looks like it doesn't, you just push it back to the bank and you pull another one across. And the thing we found that really works with our clients is having that bank So we're agnostic. We just want to find your first best one.

We don't care what it is. We just care that it's your first and your best. Yeah. Andrew Maeer Yeah, you've got a whole list of them.

It's about fine. The worst, the worst, best, or the best worst, Scott Yeah, do you know what mean? Like, because it's always better to start and learn by doing rather than because otherwise discovery can become like an almost academic exercise. That's just a research thing that expands to full time.

So that's fundamentally the big difference we've found for clients is those two things. One is a big bank of opportunities that we leave with them. And, know, I talking about that central coordination. We keep that bank of opportunities live during the engagement and at the end.

Andrew Maeer Yeah, man. Scott That's really the beginning of how they coordinate them. If they keep that live and you're always asking the same questions that we're kind of coaching them to ask, you does it fit for customers, our organization, the market, investors, et cetera? That's how they can centrally coordinate it.

So that's the approach. Once you get into it, it's research and analysis. In and of themselves, they're quite straightforward. It's how you're always aiming them at the first and the best, most desirable, viable.

Andrew Maeer Yeah. Scott and feasible opportunity and just that constant coordination and radical focus on what's the best way to achieve that, achieve our goal. It's as important to block other ones as it is to let the best one through. Andrew Maeer Yeah, yeah, and I think in that there's obviously a lot of negotiation goes on with stakeholders that you're working with and I've spoken to a lot of product leaders over the years and I would argue that a very large percentage of that role is you're a salesperson because having to do that negotiation with those stakeholders in that business because they probably Scott 100%.

Yeah, totally. Andrew Maeer already got a predetermined idea about what their problems are. They probably don't want to admit what the worst problems might be, so your job is really to get in there and tease that out to find the real pain points to deliver the most value. Scott 100 % is really interesting.

I really like the phrase negotiation to describe a lot of the role. And I think a lot of the role is soft skills. There's products often talked about using the hard skills of OKRs and roadmaps and yada yada. But I've never had one of those as magically sorted out a situation.

It's always come down to one or more critical conversations in a room. And to your point there, quite often those people, yes, sometimes They might have fear of saying something, but other times they've got critical context that is just totally invisible to the team. Do you know what mean? Quite often the team doesn't even realize how little it knows sometimes.

These people have got such fantastic context that almost exposing your ideas to them as soon as is useful and safe is the best thing because they'll quite often then reveal that context to you so that you can shape it up. Andrew Maeer Yeah. Scott But yeah, fundamentally, none of this work has any value until there is a decision made to act on it. And the decision is always in a negotiation space.

So we really, really stress the negotiation skills we've got, the kind of change skills we've got. Non-directive coaching is actually a really big one as well. How do you assume that everybody their head holds at least a part of the solution to the problem already and kind of tease it out. So the job is quite often as much about alignment as it is about you don't have to go in and come up with all the ideas yourself.

Quite often everybody has the ideas, it's the execution that is hard and that's the thing that you're there to do quite often is pull it all together, coordinate it and just execute upon it. But the point of negotiation is you negotiate a decision. and you're trying to get to that decision as effectively as possible. And I think if I personally had an internal metric about what I'm looking to change from starting an engagement to the end, it's the number of steps needed to make a good decision.

I'm quite often benchmarking behind the scenes at the beginning how many steps the last most similar decision took. And I'm thinking, right, I want it to be at least a third fewer steps. Andrew Maeer Alright. Yeah.

Scott this time and I want the decision to be at least twice as good. know, that's it's fundamentally or it's not really about research and analysis that informs the decision. The decision is to say what and it's always, always the result of negotiations. I think that's a really good good word to pick up on.

Andrew Maeer Yeah. Yeah, I remember a few years ago somebody, I was having a chat with them and they said you can always tell how agile an organization is and how good they are at making decisions by how long it takes to sign off a hundred pounds of expenses. And how many people are involved in that decision making chain. Scott That's a good one.

Just kind of fire it through. 100%. And what keeps coming up is with lots of clients, we end up supporting the middle tier. Because the middle tier is all about coordination.

You know, if delivery is literally about delivery and execution and operations, you know, your senior and executive leadership team is all about strategic priorities. The middle tier is crucial for coordinating between the strategic priorities and delivery, but also for coordinating across teams and it's the linchpin in that radical focus. If your middle tier isn't functioning or isn't set up to succeed, no matter how great your strategy or delivery is, they will be disconnected.

So quite often what we're doing is sitting and helping that middle layer. So you're releasing the value of strategic priorities and delivery by just oiling the wheels in the middle really. Andrew Maeer Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Now that all definitely makes sense. So we've talked about the what and the how. So how do you guys define success in your discovery work and what does good discovery look like in terms of outcomes? Scott It really depends what you're going in for, because some people may still be falling in over the solution.

you're just looking to do any. The thing is, it could be fantastic. It could be a fantastic solution, but you're just looking to introduce the minimum research and analysis needed to be confident to go ahead with it. So success there is maybe tweaking some of the scope of the problem, the specific users they're targeting, that, you know, the point.

Andrew Maeer Yeah. Scott bit of the market they're aiming towards. However, if people fall in love with the problem, you're almost doing the opposite thing. You're saying, are you actually thinking about this?

often talking to the team. Are you thinking about what your organization can do? Are you thinking about your unfair advantage versus your competitors? And you're trying to nudge it that way.

So success is normally the opposite of your starting point. Everybody's either overconfident or underconfident. We just all are, know, nobody is 100 % accurate level confidence. Overconfidence can often mean there's a perspective missing.

So if you're a design and engineering led company. You might be a designer and engineering led decision making process. Do you know what mean? So you might always be thinking, okay, we need to develop our app.

I spoke with the Challenger Bank years ago, actually, and that was their take, but they were looking to move into mortgages. They weren't thinking actually, mortgages are about trust. It's not about the app. We need to think about why do people go through these really painful existing mortgage processes?

Why do they stick with it? And it's because it's the most amount of money you'll ever spend. Andrew Maeer Yeah. Right, okay.

Yeah. Scott So, but the reason for saying that is the missing perspective in that example is marketing and branding and relationship with customers. It's not purely about the app. And so by focusing on the app, you kind of miss out on building the value proposition that's important to customers.

So in that instance, you've kind of got the overconfidence of maybe, because lots of tech firms have designed an engineering led, but potentially they're missing. to some extent, every other perspective that helps to do the least work needed to get there. Other people are under-confident though, you get analysis paralysis. If they're new to discovery, discovery can just be forever and they never make a decision.

And you're just helping them to be like, it's okay, we'll make it small, we'll make it testable, we'll learn and tweak if we need to, but it's best just to get doing something. And that's success in that context. Andrew Maeer Yes. Yeah.

Scott But the good success behind the scenes is if we can, it's sowing the seeds that this should be an ongoing activity, that the one-off activity we've done of mapping the opportunities, if you keep that live, you can do this for yourselves until you choose not to anymore. And that's the underlying impact that we hope to leave is helping people to do this themselves ongoing. Andrew Maeer Yeah. I think when you're talking about the right biggest problem, think, isn't that a little bit about also then getting people into a really uncomfortable place that they maybe don't like talking about that?

Scott 100%. Sometimes, you know, I'm talking about how do you radically focus on your goal? Every now and again, we'll help people kind of behind the scenes to express that. that's the way we describe it is the right problem to solve.

You know it's right when you feel uncomfortable saying it out loud, whenever it feels a little bit tense and a little uneasy, because your strategy is just how you solve your biggest problem. It's how you turn your weakness into a strength. And it's how you focus all of your energy on doing that. So, yeah, sometimes behind the scenes, it can be helpful to Andrew Maeer Yeah.

Scott help people express the strategy in really plain language, pragmatic terms. You know, this is our big problem for the next three months. This is the biggest thing we're facing. I feel uncomfortable saying this out loud, so that's why I know it's the right thing to say.

All of our efforts should go on to turning this weakness into strength. And right now, sadly, that could be we've got X number of months, X number of years to avoid going bankrupt. You know, being honest and truthful, there are Andrew Maeer Thank Right, okay. Scott Commercial companies, there are public sector companies.

are at risk of going bankrupt. In 2024, it's very different to how it was a few years ago. There's not the money sloshing around, whether it is private investment or public investment, whatever it is. You've got to rely on your business model actually being a business model.

Andrew Maeer Yeah, and... Yeah, and I guess that, you know, that test of bankrupts is the ultimate problem, right? Because if you don't solve that, then nothing else matters. Scott Yeah.

Yeah. And that's why it comes back once again to it then matters if the growth opportunities and or operational efficiencies, you I guess if you're facing bankruptcy, you've got they're not mutually exclusive, but, they're both routes you either make more money or you reduce your unit costs. And fundamentally, discovery is just a means to an end. helping an organization to operate in the messy space where, you know, it might have silos, might have structures that it's comfortable with.

But when you're facing that existential level threat, you've just got to ignore them and do whatever you need to do to grow or to increase efficiency. Andrew Maeer Yeah, and if people don't just do discovery effectively and they don't uncover that, then it just delays problems and then builds and builds and builds, Scott Just relying on good will and good luck and that might work but you wouldn't really bet on that would you? Andrew Maeer Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, we've had a really interesting kind of talk through those different elements around the discovery process.

So we always like to give our listeners some key takeaways. What would you identify the key things that you think people should take away about that discovery phase on a project? Scott I'll give you three and it's not just based on wild conjecture. So in one of my previous roles, I reviewed over 50 discoveries to lead a kind of go, don't go decision on investment in them.

I learned a bunch. I think here's the three key takeaways that really represent what we've just chatted about, but also summarize what I learned from that as well. number one, yeah, back in the 2000s and 2010s, the big issue for companies Andrew Maeer Okay. Scott and Teams was falling in love with solutions.

But like I said, in 2024, loads of companies understand that they shouldn't fall in love with a solution now. And I don't think that's the main or certainly the only issue anymore. I think actually some organizations have become really great at UX research and at finding unmet customer needs. But that alone is no longer enough.

And that's actually led to the most recent big issue. Andrew Maeer Yeah. Scott So a key takeaway, number one is falling in love with a solution is no longer the only issue, certainly, maybe not even the biggest. Key takeaway number two is that companies can fall in love with problems.

So they spot an unmet customer need and fixate on that one. And I think what we need to do is be more flexible about the customer pain points we spot. And what we need to do is map loads of them. And like I said, we need to align them again against market analysis.

and an understanding of what actually works best in the context of our company. So we've got to align those customer outcomes against our product overall, the division of the organization we're in, the organization itself, and the wider market. Back in the 2000s, lots of the models we used were designed for the very first on the internet businesses. You could kind of almost throw a dart and you'd hit a new idea.

But 2024, most of them have been done. It's really about Andrew Maeer Yeah. Scott negotiating your way through. Final one, takeaway three is, I think the biggest problem I see is that companies don't coordinate their opportunities for growth or efficiency.

And so like I said, it just happens as a result of goodwill and good luck in silos around the company. But in the current financial climate, companies have got to be radically focused on the same goal. So what we're doing is helping organizations to coordinate and in that act of radical focus. So all of their effort goes on solving that biggest problem and turning that weakness into a strength.

There's actually a book called Radical Focus and it includes a famous quote. Yeah, it's got a famous quote in it which is, what's urgent is rarely what's important. So in plain language, what we're often doing is helping companies focus on what's important. And right now it's always growth and efficiency is what we see.

Andrew Maeer Thank Yeah, it's interesting about that because I've used a thing called the Eisenhower matrix in the past. It's that urgent and important, important not urgent and it's the single best tool I've ever used to really plan and get to the front of my mind what I need to do now. Because often, you follow the path of least resistance, don't you? And something that's easy to do, maybe not important is what...

Scott It's exactly that. It's exactly. Totally. Andrew Maeer people naturally focus on.

So the eyes are, I always found really useful. Scott It's a really good, I'm glad you brought it in. wasn't sure to actually name check, but yeah, it's 100 % that. And I think what we're really providing is space for what that, as an example, that matrix would say is the thing you've got to focus on.

Quite often it's difficult in amongst it all for an organization to really make that space. And I think, you know, an organization like Herd coming in, hold that space, bring people into it for at least some of the day every now and again to really help, you know, funnel things into the right focus. Andrew Maeer Yeah, absolutely. Well, look, thank you very much for your time today, Scott.

It's been a really good conversation and really interesting in what I guess is sometimes a neglected part of the process or one that's not in enough depth. So thank you very much for your time and we'll speak to you again soon. Thanks. Scott Thanks so much.

Cheers, Andrew. Andrew Thank you very much for listening today. We hope that you found the byProduct Podcast valuable, useful, and informative. You can subscribe on all major podcast platforms, including Apple, Spotify, and also YouTube.

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