You might have an epiphany in the shower, but that’s only after you’ve spent hours studying your data, your customers, the enabling technologies and your industry.  The information that’s in the <a href="https://svpg.com/coaching-strategic-context/">strategic context</a> – the company objectives, the company scorecard/dashboard, and the product vision – is the foundation for any kind of significant insight Insights can come from anyone or anywhere. But without that preparation you probably won’t recognize the insight even if it’s right in front of you

Generating Insights requires preparation

In a strong product organization, these four types of insights are always the subject of interest and discussion, both at the leadership level and at the product team level. It is remarkable how much a product team learns, especially as they are working on product discovery on important problems. Yet it is easy for that learning to stay just with that product team.In many ways, leaders are given the data they request, not the data they need, especially to make insightful strategic decisions.

Shared learnings

Often, the big insights that form the foundation of successful product strategies come from an analysis of the product data. Especially when it comes to the business model, acquisition funnel, customer retention, sales execution data and other indicators. The data you need is not always there - you’ll have to construct a test to obtain the specific data you need. This is normal, and the sooner the organization gets good at running live-data tests, the better the chance of lasting success

  Quantitative Insights

"“Good strategy … does not pop out of some ‘strategic management’ tool, matrix, chart, triangle, or fill-in-the-blanks scheme. Instead, a talented leader identifies the one or two critical issues in the situation—the pivot points that can multiply the effectiveness of effort—and then focuses and concentrates action and resources on them.” from <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Good-Strategy-Bad-Difference-Matters/dp/0307886239">Good Strategy/Bad Strategy</a>"

User research is all about insights. User research is usually either:<ul><li>evaluative - what did we learn from testing out this new product idea? Did it work or not, and if not, why not? </li><li>generative - did we uncover any new opportunities that we weren’t pursuing, but maybe we should be?</li></ul> Most of the learning is evaluative: we know the problem we’ve been asked to solve, so we’re focused on finding a solution that actually works.   But we can always uncover things we didn't know - ask "why" a lot.

Qualitative Insights

The head of product should be aggregating the key learnings and insights from all the different teams and share summaries at the weekly of bi-weekly all-hands with the broader organization. This:<ul><li>helps the broader organization get a better understanding of the learning and insights that happen every week in the product organization.</li><li>ensures that the leader is truly grokking all the key insights and not just passing along some status in an email.</li></ul> Share widely - you never know who needs them.

Sharing Insights

The enabling technologies are constantly changing, and occasionally a technology comes along that allows us to solve long-standing problems in new, just-now-possible ways. Always be on the lookout for such opportunities. In the best organizations, it is the engineers that often identify these enabling technologies and proactively bring the possibilities to the leaders, usually in the form of a prototype.

Technology Insights

The types of insights Marty identifies and talks about are:<ul><li>Quantitative insights - from data</li><li>Qualitative insights - from qualitative research</li><li>Technology insights - from deeper understanding of the tech stack</li><li>Industry insights - from deeper understanding of the industry</li></ul>