Essay
Field Notes for Product Discovery
A short argument for treating discovery as a disciplined editorial practice.
May 20, 2026 · 7 min read
Product discovery often gets flattened into ritual: more interviews, more sticky notes, more frameworks, more artifacts. The work looks busy, yet the understanding stays thin.
What usually moves the needle is not ceremony. It is better noticing.
Better noticing means staying close to the raw material long enough to distinguish surface requests from structural tensions. It means preserving evidence instead of paraphrasing it into comfort. It means admitting that many teams do not have a prioritization problem first; they have an observation problem.
The teams I trust most tend to work like editors:
- they gather material carefully;
- they keep the source visible;
- they choose what to foreground and what to cut;
- they maintain a strong point of view without pretending certainty.
That editorial discipline is portable. It helps when you are evaluating a new workflow, building an internal AI tool, or simply deciding whether a request is a local annoyance or a repeated signal.
The real advantage is not speed. It is legibility. Once a team can see what it is actually learning, better decisions start to feel less dramatic and more inevitable.