💡Product Circle ⭕ Chat - Big bets vs small bets in Product Discovery with Sam Sida
💡Product Circle ⭕ Chat 37 with Sam Sida on how to win in Product Discovery without gambling your Roadmap
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Become Irreplaceable in 2025
Before we get to Sam’s talk (and recording) below, I’d like to share with you two great courses I’m running. Both virtually and both based on my 20+ years in Product Management.
1. Product Commercials Masterclass - P&L for Product Managers
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Over 4 hours of live training, you’ll get recordings, slides, certificate and a financial business case template you can use for your own modelling.
This course is from my real experience in Product Managemement during my time at Telstra, Optus and Virgin mobile presenting to CEO, C-suite and other Leaders.
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Come along and bring your team.
2.Pricing and Monetisation Strategies Masterclass
The Pricing & Monetisation Strategies Masterclass is one I’m really proud of. I used to teach it over 5 years ago at General Assembly in Sydney Australia. I’ve now updated it to include mine (and everyone’s fascination), GenAI.
In over 4 hours, over 3 days virtually, you’ll learn to actually calculate your customer’s willingness to pay. We start with understanding your Customer’s Perception of Value, calculate Willingness to Pay, understand the importance of Price Elasticity of Demand and how to find your Product’s Zone of Genius. We get into the factors in choosing a pricing strategy, the monetisation tactics available, how pricing psychology impacts conversion and why messaging matters. I take you through the legal and regulatory impacts on Pricing and well as how you can use GenAI in your pricing the maximise willingness to pay.
Plus, you get the recordings, the slides and a certificate upon completion.
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Now let’s get back to Sam’s talk on Big bets vs small bets in Product Discovery.
“Don’t use strategy to frame your discovery, use discovery to frame your strategy.” - Sam Sida
This 💡Product Circle⭕ Chat was run on the 30 January 2025 at 12pm (Sydney Australia time) with Sam Sida Recording below👇🏼
🎲 Product Discovery: How to Win Without Gambling Your Roadmap
Product discovery is evolving, but one challenge remains the same: how do we balance big bets and small bets in our product strategy?
At Product Circle Chat, we discussed how teams can structure their discovery efforts, minimise risk, and avoid common pitfalls like confirmation bias.
Big Bets vs. Small Bets in Product Discovery: How to Win Without Gambling Your Roadmap 🎲
Product discovery is constantly evolving, but one challenge remains the same: how do we balance big bets and small bets in our product strategy?
At our latest Product Circle Chat, we had a fascinating discussion with Sam Sida on how teams can structure their discovery efforts, minimise risk, and avoid common pitfalls like confirmation bias.
Big Bets vs. Small Bets: Understanding the Difference 🎯
In product, much like in poker, you don’t go all-in without checking your hand first. Big bets and small bets serve different roles in product discovery.
Small bets involve quick experiments, such as A/B tests, UX tweaks, and feature flags. They provide fast feedback with minimal risk and help validate ideas incrementally.
Big bets involve high-stakes product decisions, such as launching a new business model, pivoting, or making a major redesign. These require rigorous validation before full-scale implementation.
✨ Key takeaway? “Check, then raise.” Start with small, low-risk experiments before scaling up to major product bets.
A Three-Phase Approach to Product Discovery 🔍
Sam shared a structured three-phase framework that helps teams prioritise and execute their discovery efforts:
1️⃣ Insights: Gather qualitative and quantitative data. Listen to customers with an open mind, rather than seeking to validate existing ideas.
2️⃣ Experiments: Test assumptions through minimal viable experiments instead of jumping straight to MVPs.
3️⃣ Strategy: Align discoveries with product vision and business outcomes through continuous business casing.
Each phase builds on the next, ensuring that decisions are based on real evidence, not just intuition.
Avoiding Confirmation Bias in Product Experiments ⚠️
One of the biggest risks in product discovery is confirmation bias—when teams seek to prove their own assumptions rather than uncover the truth.
🔹 The problem: Teams often design experiments to validate an idea rather than to test it objectively.
🔹 The impact: Instead of finding the best solution, teams may force an outcome that fits their initial belief.
✅ How to avoid it:
Rotate experiment ownership—Ensure different people design, execute, and analyse experiments for more objective insights.
Define clear “Go/No-Go” criteria upfront—Set success metrics before starting, so results aren’t interpreted to fit a pre-existing narrative.
Use opportunity trees—Instead of testing a single idea, explore multiple solutions to the same problem and compare results.
Wall of Pain vs. Wall of Joy: Are You Tracking Both? 😊 / 😩
A powerful concept that emerged during our discussion was the Wall of Pain—a visual representation of customer struggles across the product journey.
💔 Wall of Pain: Focuses on tracking friction points—places where customers are getting stuck, frustrated, or dropping off.
💖 Wall of Joy: Captures what users love about the product—areas where they are delighted, engaged, and seeing value.
Many teams focus only on fixing problems, but growth often comes from amplifying what already works. If a segment of users is highly engaged, how can you:
Get them to refer more people?
Encourage them to upgrade or buy more?
Leverage their positive experience to build advocacy?
Understanding both pain points and moments of delight provides a more balanced approach to product improvement.
Breaking Down Big Bets into Smaller Wins 🏆
One common challenge teams face is how to break down big bets into smaller, manageable experiments. Instead of gambling the entire roadmap on an untested idea, teams can:
Start with small desirability experiments (e.g., fake door tests, early-access sign-ups) before investing in feasibility or viability.
Prioritise high-value, low-effort quick wins before committing development resources to big, costly bets.
Use a reverse funnel approach—nail the basic needs first, then layer in delighters and growth optimisations.
💥 TL;DR
Great product discovery isn’t about making one big winning bet—it’s about stacking the odds in your favour through continuous learning and iteration.
🔎 Listen widely—gather insights beyond surveys and support tickets.
📊 Test wisely—validate the riskiest assumptions first.
♠️ Play smart—don’t go all-in without checking your hand first.
Product Circle Chat 37 - Topic
Topic: Big bets vs small bets in Product Discovery
Just like Poker, product discovery is about de-risking your bets, and the good news is that you can play multiple hands at once. Which means that prioritization is key as well as keeping experiments statistically independent.
This session will explore the generation of insights, the opportunities that arise from them and the experimentations to assess these opportunities.
This approach of product discovery takes a User Centered approach, delving an opportunity tree aligned with your ultimate customer outcome: Your product vision. But we still remain business focused by practicing continuous business casing.
Product Circle Chat 37 - Video
Product Circle Chat 37 - Speaker
Sam Sida is a product leader with a career spanning B2B SaaS, startups, and e-commerce. Starting at IBM, he worked in data analytics for Telcos before transitioning to product management after completing his MBA at INSEAD.
Throughout his career, Sam has launched a Customer Experience platform serving 200 million users and scaled a collaboration app to 1.6 million daily active users. He also founded Cyberassist, an AI assistant for cyber analysts, and drove seller experience innovations at The Iconic. Currently, he is leading the greenfield e-commerce launch for Vinnies.
You can follow Sam on Linkedin
Sam’s slides - Big bets vs small bets in Product Discovery
Three recommended tools we spoke about in the chat:
Product Circle Chat - Q&A
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