Lost in the Woods

What It Covers

Petra Villa and Theresa Schwartz use Robert Koester's book *Lost Person Behavior* — a study of how people navigate being physically lost in the woods — to examine five behavioral patterns that mirror how product teams and organizations lose direction and attempt recovery.

Key Questions Answered

• •Staying Put (Escalate, Don't Wander): Teams operating in IT-execution mode — told what to build with no discovery capability — should stop and escalate rather than improvise. Attempting self-directed fixes in that context risks greater damage. The correct move is raising the alarm to experienced leaders or an advisory board, not wandering further off-path.
• •Shortcut Risk and Validation: Pursuing a strategic shortcut, like Spotify shifting from low-margin music licensing toward podcasts, is only sound if tested before full commitment. Shortcuts reflect overconfidence when taken without validation. Engineering teams are an underused resource here — they frequently surface faster paths to outcomes that product managers never consider during discovery.
• •Opportunity Mapping Over First-Path Bias: Following the first visible path is a trap. Frameworks like opportunity solution trees and KPI trees exist specifically to surface multiple paths before committing to one. The discipline is making more options visible first, then selecting directionally — not defaulting to whatever solution appears earliest in the process.
• •Intuition Requires Data Inputs, Not Replacement: Product sense and taste are legitimate factors in decision-making, but applying them means exercising judgment across all available inputs — customer data, metrics, and observation — not ignoring instruments. Teams still operating on the product manager's opinion or sales requests alone are navigating without a compass.
• •Retracing Steps to Restore Principles: When bugs pile up or outcomes drift, the fix is not faster iteration — it is pausing to revisit the quality assurance rules or product principles that eroded. In continuous discovery, each forward habit creates a feedback loop on the previous one, signaling when to step back and correct the foundation before proceeding.