The founder and CEO of NYC-based Motivate Design, Mona Patel, first came to our attention after appearing on another great podcast, Jonathan Courtney and Jake Knapp’s Product Breakfast Club.  She spoke about running and scaling an agency, which was interesting – but what really got us was her unique take on the Discovery process.  Her Insider Insight process ignores all the traditional things we know about leading questions and ignoring bias – and she claims that it generates results in as little as two weeks.  As veterans of some long and frustrating discovery processes, we had to learn more about this.

Quote of the Episode

One of the things I’ve recognised, in working with Product and Innovation folks, especially those that subscribe to an agile and lean methodology is that they kept skipping ‘research’, especially discovery research.  And when they did validation research, they really just wanted to hear what they wanted to hear.

Listen if you’d like to learn more about:

* How to use this approach to complement your current research methods

* How you can use this technique to run your own Research sprint – and how that pairs with Design sprints

* The difference between interviews and conversations

* Introducing your kids to Product thinking

Links mentioned in this episode:

* Motivate Design

* The Insider Insight methodology

* Want to be an Insider yourself? Get fast-tracked.

* The Thing About Swings children’s book (US) (UK)

Hosts

The Product Experience is hosted by Lily Smith and Randy Silver.

Lily enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. Lily has spent 13 years in the tech industry working mainly with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She has worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank in Bristol, the Product Managers’ meetup with regular events and talks on Product now with 800+ members and growing. This year Lily will be launching Productcamp in Bristol and she joins the MTP team as co-host of  The Product Experience podcast.

A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy has been working as an interactive producer and product manager across the US and UK for nearly 20 years. After launching Amazon’s music stores in the US and UK, Randy has worked with museums and arts groups, online education, media & entertainment, retail and financial services. He’s held Head of Product roles at HSBC and Sainsbury’s, where he also directed their 100+-person product community. He’s also spoken at Mind the Product Engage (Hamburg), at a number of ProductTanks (London, Zurich, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Oxford,  & Brighton… so far!) and at conferences across the US and Europe.

Music

Our theme music is from Hamburg-based Pau, featuring ProductTank Hamburg’s own Arne Kittler on bass. Listen to more on their Facebook page

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