Case Study: How Xylem PMs are running discovery

👋🏼 Hi, I’m Moiz. I'm a Fractional Head of Product who helps top climate-tech teams build product from strategy, discovery, to execution. You’re receiving this because you’re building in climate and we’ve crossed paths. Each issue distills one proven concept that I use with my clients - and gives you a way to apply it to your work.

AI is an efficiency engine.

Point it at the wrong build and it gets you to the wrong place faster.

A team of PMs at Xylem team just proved that AI takes out the tedious part.

And hands the interesting part back to you: time to think and exercise your judgement.

Here's what's inside:

• The grind is the commodity now, judgment is the scarce asset
• How a Xylem PM reduced time to a sharp roadmap decision
• Free Claude Skill to finding and testing your riskiest assumption to know you're building the right thing

Worth Repeating

"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."

Peter Drucker

Speed to revenue requires speed to judgement

Xylem is a leading global water and energy solutions company. Its Sensus brand delivers remotely managed metering products for utility companies. A key growth strategy is increasing sales of new water, gas and electric meters.

That growth depends on rewriting a legacy software platform owned by Heidi Smith, Director of Product Management and her team of PMs. The rewrite had to deliver a great customer experience and stakeholders needed it shipped last quarter.

When Heidi saw her team would have to justify every feature they kept or cut, she faced three problems:

When I spoke with Heidi, who I've known for several years in the SF climate community, she told me that she wanted her PMs bring customer insights into their roadmap decisions. This evidence was valued at Xylem and it would make stakeholders accept the roadmap with less pushback

We decided to run an AI-Powered Customer Discovery sprint that pairs discovery fundamentals with AI to do it faster.

AI is a force multiplier for product judgement

AI did not change customer discovery fundamentals:

1. Run Assumption Tests,
2. Ask Bias Blocking Questions,
3. Act on Reliable Customer Feedback

What changed is the speed to do it.

The AI Discovery Coach I built provides PMs with a structure to follow and removes the manual grind: writing interview questions, outreach emails, analyzing interviews, etc. Now the PM has time to think and exercise their judgement.

How Andrew made a high potential, low risk decision

Defining a roadmap recommendation would usually take Andrew 3-4 weeks to check all his bases. This including time to think, set up meetings, run the meetings, synthesize, and write up the recommendation.

Sometimes, when iterating on existing enterprise solutions there's only 1-2 major things to de-risk. This is not always the case, of course, but it's a nice surprise when you don't need to revisit every fundamental to make a decision. It can move faster.

For Andrew, he was redesigning a mapping feature and made an assumption that his customers would need a full GIS tool within the product. This was his Riskiest Assumption and he tested it with customers.

When he interviewed customers, he asked "Bias Blocking Questions", which are non-leading and get to the core of their problems, and used AI to generate them. After synthesizing a few conversations, he found the real need was far narrower: users only need to make custom layers with existing data, not a full GIS.

That single insight saved months of engineering time. And he got to it within a week.

Roadmap decisions, in a fraction of time

The result of the sprint was faster and better roadmap decisions that they would present to stakeholders. When a tough prioritization call comes up, Heidi and her team have customer insights that could break the tie.

The PMs who joined the sprint now understand how to apply the fundamentals of customer discovery. They know that AI speeds up the process, but I'd bet that they could run it even without AI.

“ Moiz's coaching empowered us to make roadmap decisions through a discovery sprint. We applied it to our existing roadmap immediately. My team walked away with skills and AI tools they'll actually use, not just a framework they'll forget. — Heidi Smith, Director of Product, Xylem

From Insight to Action

​Use the same Claude Skill the Xylem team used to de-risk their roadmap. Would love your feedback!

Want to hone your Product team's product judgement?

I train teams to make AI-powered discovery a skill your team owns, not a framework they forget.