The What, When & How of Product Discovery
Figuring out excatly what your users need to build products they will love!
What is product discovery
Product discovery is the first stage of any product development journey; and is an integral phase of design and development, where PMs develop a valuable, viable, and workable product. This is a process aimed at understanding what your users’ problems and needs are, and not only does it guide the way you build your product—it tells you whether you should build one in the first place. Alongside discovery as an initial exploratory stage, continuous product discovery, is a tool, mindset, and way of working that embraces the drive for customer feedback and makes it habitual.
It’s through continuous communication with customers that learnings are gathered throughout the product development lifecycle. Having a close relationship with users and letting them guide your design thinking, your overall product strategy is much more likely to end up solving real-user problems. For this reason, it’s vital to approach product discovery with a mindset that’s open to all possibilities. You might start the process with a really cool idea for a product in the back of your mind, only to find out that your users don’t need a new product after all. Maybe a few specific improvements to your current product are enough. These kinds of realisations are what make up ‘product discovery’, and what makes the process extremely interesting and productive.
The goal of product discovery
At its core, the goal of product discovery is to form a deep, understanding of what your users need and to define and validate a solution based on your users’ input. Throughout the process, it is crucial that the PM remains on track in the discovery phase by:
Testing assumptions around the idea and how it will solve user problems.
Uncovering, understanding and documenting present user issues.
Creating user personas and showing how each these users interact with the product.
Analysing user problems and understanding them deeply enough to develop effective solutions.
Defining core features that will help users in solving their pain points.
Understanding and exploring risks involved in product development and accounting for them.
The benefit of product discovery
The importance and benefits of product discovery cannot be overstated; and the trickle down effects of these benefits will be noticed long into the products’ lifecycle. These include;
Mitigating and reducing risks: In some instances, professionals have described product discovery as a risk assessment process at its core. There are multiple risks that are addressed in product discovery:
Value risk (whether customers will buy it or users will choose to use it).
Usability risk (whether users can figure out how to use it).
Feasibility risk (whether our engineers can build what we need with the time, skills, and technology we have).
Business viability risk (whether this solution also works for the various aspects of our business).
Financial risk (whether this initiative is a great use of the fiscal resources the company has).
Innovation and boosting creativity: Discovery encourages teams to uncover creative and unique ideas for delivering more lovable and useful products.
Prioritisation: Determine and invest in the features that will lead to the greatest customer happiness.
Pricing: Price the product accurately based on its true value.
User-centric approach: Conducting thorough UX research and involving users in the process ensures that the team designs the product with the end users in mind. Additionally, this allows teams to empathise with users and adopt a customer-centric mindset towards product development.
Market relevance: Through market analysis and competitive research, product teams stay informed about market trends and changing customer preferences. This means that the product remains relevant in a dynamic business environment.
Alignment with organisation goals: Product discovery helps align the product's direction with the organisation's strategic goals. These could include revenue growth, customer acquisition, or competitive advantage etc.
Continuous improvement: Product discovery is an iterative process that continues throughout the product's lifecycle. It allows teams to adapt to changing circumstances, gather new insights, and make improvements as needed; allowing the product to remain valuable and competitive.
User satisfaction: By validating the product with real users, product discovery empowers teams to deliver a product that satisfies customers; focusing on user needs leads to higher user retention and loyalty.
Product-market fit: By forcing design teams to do their due diligence and validate ideas, the product discovery phase can reduce rework and ensure that development efforts are allocated to the right features and solutions.
Data informed decision making: Product discovery encourages data-informed decision-making. The team relies on user feedback, market data, and metrics to make informed choices about feature development and product improvement.
When is it done:
New Opportunities: If you are looking to expand your business by launching your product or services in a different country or for people with different demographics, discovery is often required. It might involve research around the target audience, competitors, scope of the product, and opportunity size.
New Product Development: If you have an idea of building a new product in your mind, it is better not to start development until discovering the customer segment, their needs, and preferences. Product discovery methodologies focus on the problem space of customers and lets you build exactly what is needed.
Upgrading Products: When you plan to add a new feature to your product, it is crucial to find and analyse what problem it will solve for your users and its impact on the overall product experience.
Acquisitions or Mergers: When companies merge, the systems, processes, and tools also require consolidation. A discovery could focus on mutual problems and find solutions that serve the needs and support operations effectively.
How is product discovery conducted?
It's also important to bear in mind that continuous product discovery is a tool and ethos used to widen the product discovery stage to an ongoing mindset of regular, consistent feedback, discovery, and iteration—throughout the entire product development lifecycle.
The phases of product discovery generally fall into the following steps: Research - Ideate - Evaluate - Prioritise - Prototype - Test - Learn - Repeat. These steps are critical for:
Uncovering the user need: The goal at this stage is to absorb as much information about your users’ needs and pain points as you can until clear patterns start to emerge.
Identifying the optimal/ viable solution: Once you’ve got a healthy amount of data and feedback, your team should take a step back and prioritise the most important problems for your users. With problems prioritised, you should be able to form a clear, broad hypothesis that can form the foundation of the solutions you develop.
Then, its time to get creative and start thinking about what a new product idea might look like. Some ways to narrow down on the idea are: Does it align with your business goals? Is it relevant to your target audience or potential users? Do the numbers add up? What is the opportunity cost if we don’t do it?
Prioritising & decision making: Once you’ve narrowed your ideas down to a shortlist, you can use a prioritisation framework to assign scores for predicted value and feasibility, as a way to assess the viability of each.
Prototyping, building and testing: The final stage of product discovery means it’s time to create a mockup or MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and get some customer feedback on it.
Tools & methodologies that can be used in product discovery
There’s no singular, defined set of methods that you have to follow with product discovery, but teams rely heavily on quantitative and qualitative research to find answers. This could include customer feedback surveys, interviews, focus groups, journey mapping, insights from product analytics, competitive research, empathy mapping and various types of usability testing in your approach.
This is not an exhaustive list. Depending on your needs and organisational maturity, you might also use a variety of other product discovery methods; including customer personas, design thinking, the jobs-to-be-done framework, the MoSCoW method, A/B testing, and usability testing.
Outcome of Product Discovery Process
Product discovery isn’t just a process that you need to validate your idea. As a result of product discovery, you will have the following data that will support your product development:
A well-defined problem statement
User-journey maps
User-needs statements
A service blueprint
User Personas
Business Value Propositions
High-level wireframes