According to Marty Cagan, an award-winning product management specialist, the core purpose of product discovery is “To quickly separate the good ideas from the bad. The output of discovery is a validated product backlog.”
Product discovery is a fundamental element for businesses to move a product idea into actual development while keeping the target audience in mind.
In the early stages of product development, the direction and potential success are often uncertain. Ideally, the business must eliminate the guesswork and address all the uncertainties before pouring financial resources into product development.
In this article, we will explore:
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What is product discovery
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Provides practical tips to maximize its effectiveness
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Benefits of product discovery
What is Product Discovery?
Product discovery, in simplest words, is a process of understanding your ideal customer’s needs and business context and then using that data to develop a product. In other words, it is a process that helps businesses understand what their product should accomplish and why.
Product discovery ensures that the product team decides the right feature to build the right product for the right customer.
In order to ensure the effectiveness of the process, the product team must answer the following questions:
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Is the product idea valuable enough for the customers to trigger them to buy the product?
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Is the product usable, and can customers easily figure out how to use it?
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What about product feasibility? Is it practically possible to make the product?
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Is it strategic? That said, will it get approval from the stakeholders, and does the product align with the company’s objectives?
Digital product discovery helps minimize the uncertainties and risks attached to developing new products; here is how:
It Helps Figure Out What Customers Want
As mentioned earlier, product discovery is about determining what customers truly want. Without this knowledge, it is impossible to build a product that addresses their needs.
Getting different viewpoints in product discovery allows team members to use their own experiences and skills.
It is also helpful to collect insights from related focus groups. Listening to customers’ problems and diligently considering them before building a product is vital to making something they will happily buy.
It Fuels Product Development Efforts
Product discovery is necessary before moving to the product development phase. During this phase, product teams create detailed outlines of product features or deliverables, and hands-on development starts officially.
It is unwise to rush through the product discovery process just to reach the delivery phase. This often creates confusion when there is a risk of technical difficulties. Therefore, teams have to understand what needs to be done before deciding on how to proceed.
Product Discovery Tips and Tricks
An effective product discovery process requires more than preparing bulleted lists or a bit of brainstorming. It is important to set clear priorities that you can use throughout the entire development and evolution of your product. However, completing the product discovery process does not have to be utterly difficult. Here are some tips that will help you keep your product discovery process on track.
1. Research is The Backbone of Effective Product Discovery Technique
It is safe to say that diligent research is the backbone of the product discovery phase. The data you collect from current users, team members, and the target audience at this stage will have a decisive role in shaping the final product.
What’s more, the research results can be eye-opening for you. That said, the features you assumed are important may become insignificant once you get insights from focus groups, interviews, and analytics.
In order to deliver the desired product, the research phase should be completely unbiased.
2. Never Ever Ignore Your Ideal Customer’s Opinions
Yes, it is important to get data about the needs and wants of your customers for every of the product discovery steps.
However, it is more important to differentiate between customers and your ideal customers and give more weight to their opinions. An ideal customer will be a key component not only in keeping your business alive but helping it grow over the years.
Therefore, it is perfectly fine to give more weight to their opinions as it will help you maximize the value of your products or services.
3. Use Visual Aids for More Natural Product Discovery
Nowadays, product teams have a wide range of options, such as grids, mental maps, and matrices, to use during product discovery sessions. These visuals help uncover important aspects of a project that might not be obvious otherwise.
For example, the “validation grid” is a simple tool that can clarify goals for focus group interactions and provide deeper insights from early experiments.
4. Differentiate Between Product Discovery and Delivery
Product discovery is primarily effective in the initial stages of conceptualizing and developing your product. It is important to keep product discovery and product delivery separate because they serve different purposes.
Product delivery focuses on the specifics, while discovery is about understanding the reasons behind your designs. What’s more, before you start solving your customers’ problems, it is important to validate their issues.
This means identifying your primary assumptions and any risks involved. Save UI and UX designs for the delivery phase of development.
5. Define Clear Roles and Responsibilities
Another important thing to consider in any product discovery framework is to assign clear roles to team members from the start. This prevents task duplication and ensures everyone easily completes their tasks.
For instance:
- Decision-makers should focus on decisions
- Designers should focus on design
- Idea founders must focus on guiding the project
Following this approach streamlines the process, reduces misunderstandings, and clarifies responsibilities within the team, which eventually makes everything smoother and faster.
6. Prepare a Summary of Your Research and Collect Feedback
After the product discovery phase, you will use its findings to create a solution.
Your idea will be presented to the concerned personnel, and you will get detailed specifications for how it should work and its business aspects. This helps estimate costs and get approval from stakeholders.
Summarizing the product discovery process and highlighting key insights in an executive summary allows you to share your idea with new people without needing them to read all the documentation.
This keeps them interested and lets them focus on what interests them most. What’s more, share the discovery phase results in your organization and validate the concept with users.
You can collect feedback by conducting interviews or usability tests. Doing so will ensure the solution meets customers’ needs and the organization’s goals.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the key techniques for product discovery?
Product analysis, customer interviews, answering “the five whys,” competitor analysis, brainstorming, prototyping, prioritization techniques, and usability testing are commonly used and important techniques for product discovery.
What are the stages of product discovery?
There are four major stages of product discovery: learning and understanding, defining and deciding, ideating and prioritizing, and prototyping and testing.
What comes after product discovery?
Once the product team is done with the product discovery phase, the next step is product development. This involves:
- Determining market needs
- Studying competitors
- Coming up with a solution
- Planning how to make the product, and
- Creating a basic version to start with
Summing it up
The product discovery phase primarily improves, refines, and optimizes your product design choices to make them impactful for your targeted audience. Apart from that, product discovery is beneficial in different ways, such as:
- Reducing production costs
- Increasing product value
- Highlighting and eliminating risks
- Speeding up the development process
- Building loyalty among potential customers by designing with their interests in mind
Reach out to our team today to learn more about product discovery and how a digital product agency such as VeryCreatives can enrich yours.
