All articles on Decision-Making.
Has discovery ever killed a feature at your company? Not delayed one. Not reshaped one around the edges. Killed one. The answer tells you everything. Every product team I’ve worked with in the last five years runs continuous discovery. Weekly customer interviews, opportunity solution trees on the wall, synthesis sessions in the calendar. And in almost every case, the actual product decisions still get made by whoever holds the most organizational authority in the room.
In my first years in product management, I had all the tools: Jira boards, sprint backlogs, wiki pages, stakeholder decks. Yet the same conversations kept recurring. About priorities. About why we’d dropped things. When I mapped two sprints of actual work against the type of contribution each task made, the pattern was obvious. I wasn’t overloaded. I was unbalanced. The category I was systematically ignoring was Clarity — the one that makes every other type of work more effective.
In December 2022, my team at Trusted Shops killed the biggest feature of the year. Not because it stopped working. Because it worked too well on the wrong axis. We had pushed review questionnaire conversion up by a huge percentage. Internally, the win of the year. Three months later, we rolled it back. We learned that the volume of negative reviews mattered more to our customers than the volume of reviews overall.