What breaks first when product discovery scales?
by•
We’ve been looking a lot at how product discovery changes as teams grow.
At small scale it’s fast and intuitive, but at larger scale it often becomes fragmented, slow, or disconnected from the actual system.
From your experience-what’s the first thing that breaks in discovery workflows when teams scale?
37 views
Replies
@maya_elor Usually the first thing that breaks is alignment between what users actually need and what different teams think they need. At small scale you’re close to feedback, but as you grow, that signal gets scattered across tools and decisions start drifting away from real user behavior. I’m curious though, are you seeing more issues on the data side or on the decision making side as teams scale?
Athena
@sunshinemiller Totally agree, the drift from real user signals is exactly what we keep seeing.
What’s interesting is that it’s rarely just a data problem, the data exists, but the decision layer can’t keep up with it at scale.
With Athena, we’re trying to keep it continuous so it evolves with the product as teams scale, instead of relying on that initial snapshot.
From a developer's perspective, the first thing I notice breaking is the feedback loop. When teams are small, what users need and what's being built stay pretty close together. As things scale, that distance grows and by the time a real user problem makes it through all the CS/PM teams to whoever is going to implement the actual feature, it's often already been interpreted into something slightly different (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not) - and here we go
Athena
@sk_uxpin This is spot on! that “translation layer” between user need and implementation is where things start to distort.
At scale, discovery almost becomes a game of broken telephone.
The challenge is keeping the original signal intact all the way to the build phase, which is exactly what we’re trying to do with Athena by continuously carrying that signal through the process, not just capturing it upfront.
@maya_elor sounds like a tough task to me - good luck with that! :)
Athena
@sk_uxpin Yep :) Thanks!