Discovery Principle 8/10: Include viability!

Being lean and agile means teams will do everything they can to avoid waste. Continuous discovery, validating ideas and assumptions ahead of development, will prevent waste by ensuring we will not start building the wrong product or feature.

One dimension product teams need to tackle is viability: Can the organization support, operate and sustain our product or feature idea? Many issues can come your way: not sustainable costs, regulations and compliance, go-to-market limitations or even not supportive senior executives who will prefer to kill your project rather than let it reach the market.

Product teams should expect these challenges in the lifecycle of a product. Product managers, designers and tech leads need to anticipate and work on them as early as possible. Don't ignore or overlook them!