Part 1 - The Call to Adventure - The Hero's Journey for Product Discovery

This is the first of series where we are exploring how The ‘Hero’s Journey’ model used by the world’s greatest authors

To read an overview of the Hero's Journey format. Click Here

This model has a series of distinct steps that all great stories possess.

Part 1 Discovery = The Call to Adventure

Picture this: You're standing at the desk of a Sea Captain. Your quarters are stuffed with feature requirements, your compass points toward the next sprint, and your map is a roadmap drawn six months ago by people who've never actually spoken to a user.

Behind you lies the familiar comfort of the Feature Factory. A land where tickets get closed, velocity metrics climb, and everyone stays busy. Ahead lies a big blue ocean to discover. A voyage into the unknown will challenge your assumptions and question what it is your product does.

There is something magical about how the discovery journey itself transforms how we think about building products. Too often we get too caught up in what we know that we forget just how much there is to discover…

Breaking free from the ‘Ordinary World’ of Product Management

If you're reading this, chances are you're living in what I call the Ordinary World of product management. It's a place most of us know well. Comfortable, predictable, and quietly devastating to product success.

In the Ordinary World, your days look something like this:

Monday Morning: Stakeholders arrive with a list of features they're "certain" users want. No research required, they just know.

Tuesday: You're in back-to-back meetings discussing timelines, scope, and resource allocation for features that have never been fully validated with actual users.

Wednesday: Sprint planning consumes your morning as you break down requirements in a way where format is more important than substance

Thursday: You're explaining to leadership why adoption numbers are disappointing, even though you delivered exactly what was requested on time.

Friday: The cycle begins again with new feature requests based on competitor analysis, internal brainstorming, or someone's really convincing opinion.

Sound familiar? Welcome to the Feature Factory, where output is king, assumptions go unchallenged, and the distance between what you build and what users actually need grows wider every sprint.

The Comfortable Prison of Delivery-First Thinking

The Ordinary World of product management isn't inherently evil. In fact, it feels productive. Features get shipped. Velocity charts trend upward. Stakeholders get their requests fulfilled.

Everyone stays busy, and busy feels like progress.

But here's the uncomfortable truth: 80% of software products are rarely or never used, translating to a whopping $29.5 billion wasted in R&D spending each year. That beautiful feature you spent three months building? There's a four-in-five chance it's digital shelf-ware.

The Feature Factory operates on a seductive but dangerous premise: that we can think our way to user value. That if we're smart enough, experienced enough, or have enough data, we can predict what users want without actually engaging with them systematically.

This approach works... until it doesn't. And when it fails, it fails spectacularly and expensively.

Signs You're Living in the Feature Factory:

• Your roadmap extends 12+ months into the future with specific features locked in

• User research happens after development, not before (if at all)

• Success is measured by features delivered, not user outcomes achieved

• "We need parity" is a common phrase in planning meetings

• Pivot conversations feel like admissions of failure rather than smart learning

• Your backlog is driven more by internal opinions than external validation

• You spend more time in meetings about users than actually talking to users

Most product teams live here. But there's another way…

The Call to Adventure: Why Discovery Can't Wait

Every great adventure begins with a call. A moment when the hero realises that staying in the familiar world is no longer an option. (Hint… The call goes beyond ‘AI’…)

The Shifting Landscape That Demands Discovery

Market Velocity

Customer expectations are evolving rapidly, with AI-driven personalisation becoming standard and voice search exploding as a primary interaction mode. What users wanted six months ago might be the bare minimum today.

Competitive Pressure

Your competitors aren't just building features, they're building experiences based on deep user understanding. While you're debating feature scope in conference rooms, they're talking to users and iterating based on real feedback.

Resource Constraints

With economic uncertainty, every development dollar needs to count. Teams can no longer afford to build products and features that miss the mark and go unused. Discovery isn't a luxury, it's risk management.

User Sophistication

Today's users have been trained by Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify to expect products that seem to read their minds. They won't tolerate products that feel like they were built in a boardroom rather than designed for their specific needs.

The Hidden Costs of Avoiding Discovery

Staying in the Feature Factory feels safe yet it's the riskiest path of all. Consider the hidden costs:

Opportunity Cost

Every sprint spent building the wrong thing is a sprint not spent building the right thing. Your window of market opportunity shrinks with each misaligned feature.

Technical Debt

Features built on wrong assumptions create technical debt that compounds over time. Pivoting becomes exponentially more expensive the longer you wait.

Team Morale

Nothing demoralises a product team faster than watching carefully crafted features go unused. Discovery prevents the cycle of build-launch-disappoint that burns out even the most passionate teams.

Customer Trust

Users notice when products don't serve their needs. Each misaligned feature erodes trust and makes future adoption harder.

Market Position

While you're building features no one wants, competitors who understand their users are capturing market share with solutions that actually matter.

*No one wants also includes significant dev effort to appease one or few clients where return cannot be realised… Beware the Parity trap…

The Promise of the Discovery Journey

Product discovery isn't just about building better features—it's about fundamentally transforming how you approach product development. The goal of product discovery is not necessarily to ship features. Rather, it's to promote an environment of learning that will help you improve your product incrementally and consistently.

Teams that embrace discovery as a core discipline report:

Higher success rates: Features built with discovery have dramatically higher adoption and usage rates

Faster iteration: Understanding user needs upfront reduces build-measure-learn cycle time

Clearer priorities: Direct user feedback makes roadmap decisions obvious rather than political

Better stakeholder alignment: Evidence-based decisions are harder to argue with than opinion-based ones

Increased innovation: Talking to users reveals opportunities you never would have imagined