Product discovery helps you discover everything you need to know about your product before developing it. It brings to light a product’s strengths, weaknesses, advantages, and drawbacks before any stage of development or release. Proper product discovery is the difference between a flop at launch and a booming success.
By understanding product discovery, you give your product the best chance to rise above the competition.
Here are five key benefits of product discovery:
1. Better Product-Market Fit
Focused audience research highlights exactly what your intended customer base wants and needs from your product. This allows you to achieve product-market fit faster, which contributes to your app’s financial success.
The main goals of target audience research in product discovery sessions are to:
- Get a deep, impartial understanding of what your users demand
- Use the insight gained to modify your product approach
Focus groups, user interviews, and journey mapping are some methods for better understanding your audience’s needs.
Focus groups
Gathering a small group of users together to share ideas, preferences, and frustrations is a more organic way to gain awareness about your product. Just like having a conversation, deep insights often arise from hearing others speak. Make sure your group is diverse, communicative, and excited to participate.
Before you start recruiting, put together a recruitment screener with relevant questions to zero in on your target market. You can solicit participants through social media, cold emailing, or referrals from people you know. Offer incentives to get people to bite.
A lead-off question can be something like:
“We are holding short Zoom sessions to get feedback about our product. As a thank you, you will be sent (small incentive). Would you be willing to participate? Please answer some short questions below if so.”
Include questions regarding:
- Age range
- Current geographical location
- Household income
- Ethnicity
- How participants identify
- A short description of their experience with products like yours
There are also third-party market research companies that offer panels with people who have done focus groups previously. After you’re ready to go, put together a script with an introduction, instructions, questions, and closing remarks. Get any additional materials ready, such as note cards or a whiteboard, if you want to do some ice-breaking or onboard the process.
Focus groups can be either moderated or unmoderated. If moderated, try to steer the conversation away from conjecture and towards more actionable comments. And take notes of course!
User interviews
User interviews reveal customer motivations, detailed feelings, and concerns. You may also discover new, interesting use cases of your product. You can use focus groups as a lead-in to user interviews, using notes about what was learned in the focus group.
Avoid close-ended “Yes and No” or multiple choice-type questions, and go with open-ended questions that begin with “Why” “What” or “How” instead. Open-ended questions let respondents explain answers in their own words without pressure and allow for follow-up questions to drill down deeper.
Some good open-ended questions are:
- What’s the most annoying thing about [problem-related to product]?
- How do you usually solve (specific task)?
- What would you change about (relevant product type) if you could?
- What are some (websites/products/services) you use often?
- Why do you use (appropriate service or product)?
- If you had one tool to make your digital life easier, what would it be?
- Can you describe your typical day?
You can use focus groups as a lead-in to user interviews, using notes about what was learned in the focus group.
Journey mapping
Journey maps are visual layouts of user interactions with your product or service. They provide a blueprint of your user’s experience, from signing up to activation to navigation to interacting with specific features.
If you have another product in use, you can use the user interaction data (completion rate of tasks, time spent on tasks, etc.) to create a map of a predicted journey for a specific task before users test it out for themselves. You can also do this if it’s your first product, using the research you’ve done to compare a customer’s actual journey map to see the reality vs. your expectations.
You can also create maps of a customer’s daily life to understand how your product fits in and maps about their emotional journey while using your product to understand their felt-level, step-by-step experience.
One example is a “day in a digital life” chart that describes a typical user’s digital diet in the mornings, during work, on commutes, and in the evenings. Another example is an empathy map, which has different sections for what a user says, thinks, does and feels during testing, which you can note in the appropriate sections.
Audience research do’s and don’ts:
✅ Test your assumptions
✅ Ask open-ended questions
✅ Take reactions at face value
✅ Create an easy-going environment
✅ Identify pain points
❌ Attempt to validate pre-existing ideas
❌ Ask close-ended questions
❌ Ask leading questions expecting a certain answer
❌ Let strong voices dominate the discussion
❌ Pressure participants
High-caliber user feedback gets straight to the heart of your product, so you can bring it to life.
2. Reducing production costs
Excessive costs are one of the greatest risks to a new software development project. Sunk costs can turn a sure thing into a flop. Reduce initial costs early on to keep your business from overextending itself before your product can even be sold.
Two product discovery tools to reduce production costs are prototyping and usability testing.
Prototypes
Prototypes are invaluable for hands-on testing to get real-time feedback. Early prototypes should be inexpensive yet functional so you can learn quickly and modify your prototype on the fly. Try creating multiple prototypes to test concepts in parallel, either by using multiple focus groups or inviting the same group back to try a different mockup (with another incentive, of course).
Try different constraints for each prototype as well, such as time constraints when doing a specific task or specific UIs designed for digital luddites, tech-savvy users, or even young children, to eliminate preconceived ideas about what your users enjoy.
Usability testing
Usability testing lets you see first-hand just how easy your product is to use. Assign specific tasks, scenarios, or goals and monitor how your product performs.
Usability testing can be either quantitative or qualitative.
Quantitative results such as misclicks, time spent, or completion rates give you hard numbers to steer development, while qualitative results are observations that give you food for thought in a redesign.
When doing qualitative testing, encourage your participants to “think out loud” about their experience.
| Quantitative usability testing | Qualitative usability testing |
|---|---|
| Data-driven | Observation-driven |
| Discover practical issues | Discover how, why, and in what manner customers experience your product |
| Validate current design decisions | Illuminate future design decisions |
| Statistics, percentages, and other numeric data compiled afterward | Direct recording of user interactions and reactions |
Benefits of Prototyping and Usability testing:
- Define necessary vs. extraneous features
- Compare and contrast different concepts
- Test ideas quickly
- Validate what works
- Reveal product flaws
- Uncover new design opportunities
- Get hard data about first clicks, eye-tracking, and other important metrics
- Understand customer habits
- Use your budget efficiently!
If you’ve devoted ample time to product discovery, you can fine-tune a product’s look and function and use your resources where they count.
3. Increasing product value
Product discovery is a golden opportunity to increase product value since you can explore the ground zero of your product at your own pace and unearth loads of insights from every angle. By incorporating user feedback and dissecting competitors, you can make your product the best it can be.
Quality user feedback not only lets you get rid of what doesn’t work but adds value to your product in areas you never foresaw. Look at the features your customers request, and ask yourself how your product can implement them.
Also, conduct competitor analysis to see how competitors handle in-demand features, understand what makes your product different, see what competitors are doing better, and figure out how to stand out more in the market.
You can use SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis on competitor marketing campaigns and marketing strategies, product features, pricing models, and customer feedback to see how you match. By getting a clearer idea of how you measure up, you can tweak your product to outpace the competition.
Product discovery increases product value by:
- Pinpointing what makes your product unique
- Revealing unthought-of customer needs
- Troubleshooting technical hurdles
- Helping you streamline features
- Highlighting cost-efficient redesigns
- Making obvious what features to cut
- Seeing why competitors are valued, so you can do it too
Quality user feedback and competitor research make it much easier to develop a compelling value proposition from the get-go.
4. Highlighting and eliminating risks
Excessive risk can discourage management from sticking with new product development plans.
Here are some risks to consider during product discovery:
⚠️ Completion risks: Missed deadlines or a delayed launch.
⚠️ Market risks: Low demand for proposed product features.
⚠️ Financial risks: Price wars with competitors or maintenance costs.
⚠️ Intellectual property risks: Infringing on a patent.
⚠️ Project management risks: Mismanagement of resources or team members leaving.
⚠️ Technical and performance risks: Bugs or errors with software integration.
⚠️ Legal risks: Compliance with regulatory requirements.
⚠️ Operational risks: Supply chain failures or lack of reliable vendors.
Here are some solutions to highlight and eliminate risks during product discovery:
✅ Create a structured plan with a clear timeline.
✅ Run market testing to control for evolving market trends.
✅ Specify a budget with key benchmarks.
✅ Research existing trademarks, patents, and copyrights in-depth.
✅ Maintain proper documentation and communication with all team members.
✅ Conduct active training and development to ensure technical expertise is up to date.
✅ Monitor regulatory standards to identify potential violations.
✅ Build strong relationships with vendors and suppliers and establish clear communication channels
By assessing your product concept in detail before starting the development process, you can rule out risky moves before they occur.
5. Speeding up development
To craft a hit product, it’s wise to slow down before jumping into development. Design pivots, missed deadlines, added features or other unforeseen hurdles can slow progress to a standstill and threaten your bottom line. In the end, taking your time with product discovery makes development faster since you iron out all the details that might cause issues later.
Through product discovery, you can map out the development process to stay on budget and true to your timeline.
Prototyping and usability testing let you evolve your product in real-time, while quality user feedback and competitor research save time and money by highlighting what works and what doesn’t.
Proper discovery helps you get your Minimum Viable Product just right, ensure customer expectations are met, and surprise the competition.
Focus on product ideas with the highest likelihood of succeeding in the market, with the insights gained through the steps above, and refine them before the new product launch to hit the ground running.
Conclusion
Product discovery helps you understand your market, save costs, increase value, hit your timeline, and avoid any disasters along the way. It pays to be a perfectionist, and product discovery is the perfect time to hammer out all the details so you have an optimal product ready to go.
VeryCreatives partners with brands looking to make a splash with their next digital product or their very first. From planning to design to MVP development, we’ll walk you through the process with our deep well of knowledge.
Whether it’s the technical side or the business side, you have years of expertise at your disposal. Schedule a call with VeryCreatives today, and get ready to launch into the stratosphere.
