Run continuous discovery one step ahead of delivery. Ideas land in a single inbox from interviews, support tickets, and usage data; the strongest get a short problem brief and a cheap validation step; validated ones become a scoped brief that engineering sizes with you. Delivery runs in short iterations with a demo, then a metrics review at two weeks and six weeks after launch.
Why interviewers ask this
Interviewers want the actual shape of your operating cadence, not a textbook diagram. They listen for discovery running in parallel rather than as a phase, for engineering seeing work before it is committed, and crucially for what happens after launch. Most candidates describe a process that stops at ship, which tells the interviewer the team never learns whether anything worked.
How to structure your answer
- Describe discovery running ahead of delivery, not as a phase.
- Explain the single intake and how items get selected.
- Include a cheap validation step before anything is committed.
- Have engineering size the brief before it enters a cycle.
- Finish with the post launch metrics review and its threshold.
Example answer
We run discovery about a cycle ahead of delivery so engineering is never waiting on me. Everything comes into one inbox: interviews, support tickets, sales notes, usage anomalies. Once a week I go through it with the designer and the engineering lead and we pick the small number worth understanding better. Those get a one page problem brief and some cheap validation, which might be five interviews, a fake door, or just checking whether the behavior already shows up in the data. Anything that survives becomes a scoped brief we size together, and I have a strong rule that engineering sees it before it is committed to a cycle. Delivery is two week iterations with a demo at the end that anyone can attend. Then the bit people skip: a metrics review at two weeks and again at six weeks after launch, against the failure threshold we wrote down at the start.
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See how it worksFollow-up questions to expect
- How do you protect discovery time when delivery pressure is high?
- What happens to an idea that fails validation?
- Who runs the post launch review, and who attends?
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