Product Discovery
Product discovery is a method of deeply understanding your customers to develop products that perfectly suit their needs.
Product Discovery
Product discovery is a method of deeply understanding your customers to develop products that perfectly suit their needs. It’s a critical stage in the product design process because if companies do not accurately prove or disprove their assumptions about their customers, they may waste time building products that nobody needs.
Product discovery plays a key role in helping product teams decide which features or products to prioritize and build while setting the stage for achieving product excellence.
While discovery is not to be confused with formal research study, it requires some of the same skills. And a certain mindset that can be honed with self-awareness and a little practice.
The Goal of Product Discovery
A product discovery phase is the first and foremost stage of design and development. This is an iterative process that helps teams to refine their ideas by deeply understanding real user problems and needs.
As a result, they can reduce the risks around the future project and build a product that provides an actual value for a user.
The product discovery process has two distinct parts. It includes developing a profound understanding of customers, then using that knowledge to build vital products for customers.
Why is Product Discovery Essential for Product Teams?
Cultivating a deeper understanding of customers helps product teams create products that customers want and need.
The process enables teams to move beyond “nice to have” features and products towards building products that solve a problem and become a genuine necessity for customers.
Product discovery provides value to the product team, value to the company (e.g., not wasting valuable resources pursuing the wrong ideas and developing products nobody wants), and value to customers by delivering something they may very well consider vital.
The process of product discovery ensures that product managers and teams are on the right track in prioritizing and building a product that will be successful.
Product Discovery offers Product Teams higher confidence in their path forward. It is also the foundation for a successful implementation and launch phase later on.
The Adaptable Product Discovery Approach
Adaptable Product Discovery allows you to:
Understand when to use which technique to get the most out of your Product Discovery process.
Take steps towards an evidence-based product culture—no matter where you start.
1. Invest in Synchronous Alignment
Don't confuse shared information with real understanding.You have written down the context or critical problem behind a Product Discovery in a Google Doc, but that doesn't mean everybody is actually on board.
Instead, invest in synchronous meetings with team members and stakeholders to walk everyone through your narrative and discuss it.
2. Prepare and Facilitate Ideation Sessions
It's way easier to get away with an improvised ideation session when everyone is in the same room. In a remote scenario, that will not end well (trust me). Instead, invest the time up front in picking a moderator (or take on the role yourself) and prepare the workspace.
Plan for virtual icebreakers, explain tools, and walk through exercise outcomes.
3. Connect the Dots on a Central Hub
There's certainly no shortage of tools you can deploy for remote Product Discovery activities. But that's also one of the most significant risks—having your user insights, experiment results, and ideas scattered across numerous tools and file servers.
4. Democratize Access and Editing
Effective remote Product Discovery is based on communication and collaboration at eye-level. No one should have an advantage due to their location.
Product discovery refers to the activities required to determine if and why a product should be developed.
Product Discovery vs Product Delivery
Product Discovery, as stated above, is about understanding what kind of solution is needed. It’s about understanding clients and their needs. It’s also about addressing their pains and creating value for them.
Product Delivery, on the other hand, is about building the solution figured out in the discovery process, with scrum methodology for example. It’s about bringing it to clients, seeing their reaction and building on it with future releases.
Now that we have the WHY part covered, and we covered a bit of WHAT too, let’s move on to WHEN.
When to do product discovery? What is continuous discovery?
A very reasonable approach is to begin with proper product discovery, starting very early. It should happen before you even write the first line of code or attempt to sell anything.
Retreat with the team for a few days, relax, brainstorm and generate tons of ideas. Come back, put them in place and see what users think.
That’s why continuous product discovery should be a part of your delivery process. This doesn’t mean weekly retreats with the team (however nice these sound). It’s not about going through the whole process over and over again. This means:
Craving user feedback. It’s about reading app reviews and analyzing support tickets. It’s about harvesting as many feedback sources as you can to understand your users’ point of view.
Testing how users use your product, where they get lost, and what the bottlenecks are.
Reaching out to users, asking for their opinion, and trying to figure out what the problems they’re struggling with are.
The purpose of product discovery is to make sure we have some evidence that when we ask the engineers to build a production-quality product, it won’t be a wasted effort
One of the best traits of high-performing product teams is how fast they iterate a solution based on findings of past cycles, not how rigid their process is.The best way to ensure that your solution solves a real problem is by shipping working software and getting it in your user’s hands.
Framing
Product teams use Discovery framing techniques to identify the issues that need to be addressed during discovery.
When teams believe there are large risks, they use planning and framing to set up the discovery activities. This approach is frequently required on large product initiatives. This first step results in an overall framework for the discovery work.
Common framing goals are:
Making sure the team is aligned on business objectives, customer problems, user profile, and success criteria;
Identifying the the major risks that will need to be addressed during discovery work.
What are the benefits of a Discovery Phase?
Clearly define the scope of the project and the desired outcomes;
Develop a solid understanding of your target audience, their expectations and the market in general;
Validate your idea against market requirements and make sure that your product solves real problems for its potential users;
Identify possible risks and develop a response plan in advance;
Prevent costly changes during the development phase.
Roles in the Product Discovery Process
The major roles in a product discovery team are:
Business Analyst is responsible for gathering requirements from all stakeholders, including target audience interviews and market research, to build a solution that will bring value.
UX Designers’ job is to understand the business goal of a client and the needs of their users to transform them into an exceptional user experience. A UI UX design company also creates and tests the prototype.
Product Manager is to organize the product discovery process: teamwork, communication with the client, and weekly reporting. Their job is to reserve resources and deliver artifacts to the client on time and with good quality.
Tech Lead or a Solution Architect analyzes the artifacts of the product discovery phase to make sure that the designed business logic is technically implemented and offers the optimal architectural solution.
This is how the product discovery process at looks like.
Product Discovery describes the iterative process of reducing uncertainty around a problem or idea to make sure that the right product gets built for the right audience.
6 Steps for conducting better Product discovery:
1. Prepare the whole team
Truly in-depth product discovery means you need to understand your customer holistically. For example, when talking to customers:
Product managers may develop use cases.
Product marketers may quantify willingness to pay.
UX researchers may construct workflows and journeys.
Engineers may analyze technical capabilities.
Designers may assess usability.
Understanding your customer requires involving your whole team.
It’s not enough to have one person do some research on your customers, fill in the blanks with their best guess, and then present their “findings” to the team.
2. Isolate your customers’ problems
As a product manager, you’ve likely heard this many times, but when listening to customers, it’s crucial to avoid getting stuck on the solution to the problem. Pay attention to the problem itself.
3. Collect feedback in a systematic way
The next step in product discovery is to collect and organize feedback from your customers.
The problem with collecting insights from customers is that it can be overwhelming. You’ll have feedback in all sorts of places — email, social media, website chat, customer service, and sales calls.
When this information isn’t organized, it’s tough to spot trends and identify patterns. You could organize it in a spreadsheet, but that can quickly get overwhelming.
4. Test ideas with an MVE
Now you’re ready to build the thing your customer wants, right?
Actually, no. There’s another step when you’re doing solid product discovery. Some people call it a Minimum Viable Experiment.
The goal is to test the concept of your new feature before you devote development time.
Your MVE should take minimal time to create, use minimal resources, but still tell you something about your potential feature.
5. Move forward or scrap the idea
With product discovery, there are going to be a lot of ideas that don’t make the cut — possibly more than you expect. Don’t get discouraged, though. That means that you’re on the right track.
It’s much better to discard an idea at this point than when your team dives into development.
6. Iterate the whole thing
You’ve determined your feature idea has potential, or maybe it doesn’t. Either way, the next step is to start over from the very beginning.Or, you might need to re-evaluate if you’re really isolating the customer’s problem. If you built it, then assess how customers are using it.
Customer Letter
This document projects you forward in time to a point at which your product has already been released and a customer is writing to your CEO to express their happiness with your product.
The customer letter technique is Cagan’s variation on the Amazon press release.This is a great tool to use for new feature and product development because it gets you thinking “with the end in mind.”
Conclusion
Product discovery is an important tool set to work out how to build the RIGHT product and to build the product RIGHT.
Product discovery is a team sport.
Carrying out this work makes it more likely to create a product user actually want and need.
Do you want to learn more about Product Discovery?
Recommended Reading:
https://www.romanpichler.com/blog/product-discovery-tips/
https://aktiasolutions.com/what-is-product-discovery/
https://railsware.com/blog/product-discovery/
https://www.productbookshelf.com/2021/01/product-discovery-techniques/
