Product discovery is becoming a trendy topic in the world of digital products. Why? What is it? And what do you need to know about it? I’ve got you covered. Get the product trio’s guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery.
What is Product Discovery?
Product discovery is used to describe the work that is done to make decisions about what to build while product delivery is the work done to build, ship, and maintain a production quality product.
- Good product discovery includes the customer throughout the decision-making process.
The Underlying Structure of Product Discovery
Good product discovery starts with a clear outcome
- Once a product outcome is selected, the product team needs to discover the opportunity space
- The opportunity space is infinite
- Opportunities represent customer needs, pain points, and desires
- Teams need to discover solutions that will address those opportunities
Product Discovery Week Over Week
Good product discovery teams engage in two key activities week over week: customer interviewing and assumption testing.
- Interviewing helps to discover customer needs, pain points, and desires
- Assumption testing allows to collect the data needed to compare and contrast different solutions against each other
- Opportunities emerge from customer stories
- When it comes to discovering solutions, many teams rely on project research
- Full-solution prototype testing or A/B tests to understand impact
Understanding Project-Based Discovery
In a project world, most of the product discovery decisions are made by business stakeholders in the annual budgeting process.
- Product discovery activities are limited to project-based interviews (interviews conducted during a dedicated phase) and validation research (usability testing and A/B testing).
Who Does Product Discovery?
A product trio-typically comprised of a product manager, a designer, and a software engineer-leads product discovery.
- The product trio should interview customers together and collaborate on and execute assumption tests together to make good product discovery decisions.
Continuous Discovery
Digital products are never done. We can always iterate and improve.
- If we are continuously making decisions about what to build, we need to stay continuously connected to our customers to ensure that our product discovery decisions will work for our customers
- Product people suffer from a bias called the “curse of knowledge.” As we develop expert knowledge about our product, we forget what it was like before we had that knowledge
- There’s an easy way to avoid this: engage with customers weekly
