The modern digital product team gathers in a glass-walled conference room at a Seattle technology firm. Sitting around the table are the product manager, three engineers, a UX designer, and a data analyst. They’re not debating a completed feature or fighting about a product roadmap. Instead, they’re engaged in what increasingly organizations call “product discovery”—a collaborative exploration of user problems before a line of code is written.
This moment, all too familiar to top tech organizations, marks a sea change in the way that product and engineering teams interact. The old model of handoffs—product folks defining requirements, engineers building out—has its days numbered.