Teresa Torres is a thought leader in the product space who focused specifically on Product Discovery. She recently published Continuous Discovery Habits. Her ideas can be considered as a mental model combining all the different aspects and tools around Product Discovery.

Measure Delivery — What about Discovery?

In a nutshell, in the past decades Product Delivery has improved massively. The industry moved from annual releases to quarterly releases to night builds to continuous integration. We measure code quality, bug rates, story points, team velocity, and many more.

But for Product Discovery?

How do we know if we are doing a good job?

Teresa Torres, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7-5x0ra2

In other words, how do we know whether we actually build the right things, the things that bring value to customers and business outcomes to the company? How do we know before spending huge budgets and failing very late?

Evolution of Product Discovery

The following is a quick excerpt from a blog post by Teresa Torres. For the full story check

Product Managers and Product Owners: What's the Difference? | Product Talk

Or watch Teresa speak at PRODUCTIZED:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7-5x0ra2tc

But here's the key essence in brief:

Traditional PM

Product Management back in the previous century started very much as a discipline where business stakeholders told Product Managers about the needs, Product Managers defined the requirements and then handed over to a separate team. So

There is no customer involved, they are not even pictured.
There is a hand-off of information without any feedback loop.
The team actually doing the job is far away from the actual customer, with no way to understand their pains and gains.

Source: https://www.producttalk.org/2020/10/product-managers-product-owners/

Scrum

Agile methodologies, most notably Scrum introduced the Product Owner role but also pulled the customer in. What's more, short iterations in sprints aimed at fast feedback loops — while it is questionable whether in all circumstances a business customer will join 2-weekly sprint reviews.

(Personally, I have experienced that more on a quarterly level.)

We still have the product person owning the requirements, here by writing requirements in epics and stories.

Project-Based Discovery

A major shift happens when teams move on to what Teresa Torres calls project-based discovery: have a product trio of Product Manager + Product Designer + Engineer actively involved in Product Discovery.

But there is still some kind of hand-over happening at the end of Discovery, in the form or written requirements to the delivery team.