Regardless of our industry or discipline, what matters most in is that we build things that people actually want. That may sound obvious, but a surprisingly large number of ideas fail not due to flaws in execution but because they never found a suitable market.

To avoid that mistake, Alberto Savoia argues, we need a new approach to product discovery and design, one which focuses a lot more on learning than on building. The data-driven techniques he presents include pretotyping, hypozooming, and many others. They’re designed to be useful in startups, in-house projects, as well as large enterprises and aim to help us discover what our right it is before we invest endless resources in building something that nobody will want to use.