A Mental Model to Handle Product Discovery Overwhelm
If you are a product manager or business analyst who has suddenly been thrown into a new environment with a complex stakeholder ecosystem, this should help you.
Symptoms
- You are feeling lost, sometimes overwhelmed, in the maze of diverging business requirements coming from different stakeholders.
- Going from ambiguity to clarity seems a daunting task.
- You get stuck with data and analysis-paralysis trying to satisfy every requirement.
- As a result, your product roadmap never appears to crystallize.
- And being able to clearly articulate your point of view becomes a challenge.
Don't worry. You are not alone. This has been one of the commonest hurdles faced by new product managers handling complex ecosystem-actor platforms.
Reality vs Expectations
- Even though you have a structured process towards discovery, the inputs you receive are seldom structured.
- Every business team, very clearly has a set of key results it is expecting to achieve. By design, they are not expected to have a clear line of sight of other teams' needs.
- Even though every team believes and is driving to the same vision of success, the pathways to success and mental models towards executing towards success are often very different.
Going from Lack of Structure to Structure
- Isolate and Identify: Unbundling various needs into their more elemental parts.
- Synthesizing: Bring together different combinations of ideas in interesting ways.
- Growth Loop: Creating a sense of the current state and what the next incremental step of transformation can be. Consider how much can users be nudged towards the final vision without making them feel overwhelmed.
But How do you do This?
Enter the Islands and Bridges Framework
David Perell's writing framework offers a powerful solution for product discovery. The concept is beautifully simple: start with islands of knowledge, then build bridges between them.
Building Your Islands
Collect standalone insights from every source:
- Customer interviews
- Usage data
- Support tickets
- Market research
- Team observations
Keep each insight independent. Use sticky notes - one clear insight per note. Don't worry about connections yet. Further isolate and identify different concepts within these insights if needed.
Discovering Patterns
As you accumulate islands, patterns naturally emerge. Group related insights together. These clusters often reveal unexpected user needs and opportunities you might have missed with a more structured approach.
Building Bridges
Only after you have a solid collection of insights should you start building bridges - the connections that transform scattered observations into coherent product solutions. These bridges might be:
- Feature relationships
- User journey flows
- Dependencies
- Priority connections
Why This Works
The islands-first approach allows your product strategy to evolve organically from real insights rather than assumptions. It keeps you open to unexpected discoveries and prevents premature solution lock-in.
Getting Started
- Dedicate a wall or board to your islands
- After each discovery activity, capture one clear insight
- Review and group weekly
- Look for emerging patterns
- Build bridges only when patterns are clear
Remember: Great products, like great writing, often start as scattered insights before becoming coherent solutions. Embrace the fog of early discovery - clarity will come through the process, not before it.
Ready to try this? Start with just one week of collecting insights. Tell me how it goes..
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