Discovery and delivery balance

Modern product management involves continuous discovery and delivery running in parallel. Discovery focuses on identifying and validating what to build. This includes understanding user problems, testing solutions, and reducing risk before significant investment.

Delivery involves building production-quality products that create real user value. PMs orchestrate both streams, ensuring engineers contribute to discovery while staying involved in delivery to clarify requirements and handle edge cases.

This parallel process replaces traditional waterfall handoffs where requirements were "thrown over the wall." The balance shifts based on product maturity. New products emphasize discovery while established ones might focus more on delivery optimization. PMs must resist pressure to skip discovery in favor of faster delivery, knowing that building the wrong thing quickly still results in failure.^[1]