Showing Your Work
What is showing your work?
Showing your work means visualizing your thinking and making your discovery process visible to others, especially stakeholders. Instead of just presenting final answers—like backlogs full of user stories or roadmaps full of features—you share the full journey: the opportunities you uncovered, how you prioritized them, what solutions you considered, what experiments you ran, and what you learned.
This approach invites stakeholders to examine your thinking, question your decisions, and co-create with you rather than simply agreeing or disagreeing with your conclusions. By showing your work, you transform stakeholder conversations from opinion battles about what to build into evidence-based discussions about which path looks more promising.
Why does showing your work matter?
When you only present right answers—the backlogs and roadmaps—you're asking stakeholders to give you their opinions on those outputs. And more often than not, they're going to have their own opinions about what you should build. They aren't going to be aligned with your opinions because you haven't shown your work. You haven't shown why these outputs matter.
And we all know when a Hippo (highest-paid person's opinion) has a different opinion, the Hippo always wins.
But when you use tools like the opportunity solution tree to show all the options you've uncovered and which decisions you've made, you invite stakeholders to examine your thinking. If they disagree with you, you have all the other options in front of you. In this world, the Hippo doesn't always win. You win together.
How do you show your work effectively?
Start by visualizing your thinking. You can use an opportunity solution tree or another visual tool that helps you explore potential paths to your desired outcome. The key is to make your thinking easy for others to understand.
Regularly share what you're doing and make your work visible to your team members and stakeholders throughout the discovery process. Keep stakeholders involved, not just at the end. Find formats that make your work consumable—ways that leadership can say "I get it and I have these questions" or "I don't get it and we need more of X for us to be confident."
This practice helps you stay aligned with your team and builds stakeholder confidence in your direction. Instead of defending a single solution, you explore potential paths to your desired outcome together.
Learn more:
- Show Your Work: How to Justify Your Decisions & Get Stakeholder Buy-In
Related terms:
- Opportunity Solution Tree
- Stakeholders
- Continuous Discovery
- Outcome
Last Updated: October 25, 2025