1/36 - Product Discovery Process
"The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that is changing quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks." - Mark Zuckerberg
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What is product discovery?
Product discovery is the continuous process of learning how your product can better serve your customers. It helps you understand what product your team could build, whether you should build it, and what you need to know about your customers to build it right.
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.
Why is product discovery a must?
A discovery phase helps eliminate incorrect market assumptions before jumping into development. However, building a unique and exciting product is not enough. It’s vital to align your solution with actual customer needs if you have serious plans to succeed in the long run. Here are the key benefits you can get from product discovery:
Value-driven approach. Build a product that’s vital to customers, not just nice to have. Product discovery reveals your product’s unique values that will ensure competitiveness and business success.
Identify the optimal solution. Focus on a deep understanding of the fundamental problems that need to be solved. Don’t waste your budget on developing features that bring no value to users.
Cost-effectiveness. High-quality product discovery significantly reduces the cost of product development. A complete understanding of the product’s environment, target audience, and business model minimizes uncertainty during implementation.
Product strategy-oriented. You can build the product’s strategic vector based on market knowledge, niche, target customers, and their problems. A well-thought-out strategy helps you keep your product up-to-date and thriving.
Discover and minimize risks of failure. Higher certainty in user needs helps minimize value and usability risks. The correct development strategy minimizes product feasibility and business viability risks.
Faster time to market. Instead of testing ideas in the post-delivery phase, with product discovery, you can dismiss non-viable hypotheses during the discovery phase. As a result, you can release the final product to consumers faster.
Agility. Product discovery is essential to the software development life cycle (SDLC). It is based on Agile methodologies focused on achieving goals quickly and accurately. The initial discovery phase removes numerous misconceptions or incorrect assumptions, minimizing uncertainty throughout the development process.
When do you need product discovery?
Basing product development on assumptions is risky. Whenever the team is uncertain about what to build, for what customers, and why, it’s time to get meaningful answers using product discovery. Here are the situations when the team needs it:
New product development. If you have an idea for a new product, investigate your potential customer segments and study their problems to build what they need.
Upgrading an existing product. Adding new functional modules or upgrading existing ones requires product discovery. Additionally, it helps you discover what features can attract new customers if you plan to create and launch a new product version.
New business opportunities. If you plan to expand your business by launching products in new markets, product discovery may help you research the target audience, competitors in new markets, the product scope, and changes to meet local audience requirements.
Acquisitions or mergers. Product discovery focuses on identifying mutual problems and finding suitable solutions when companies merge to consolidate resources and processes.
What team do you need to run the product discovery process?
Product discovery is a team effort. Cross-functional collaboration between different roles is the approach we follow at RubyGarage. Here are the key members involved in the process:
Client: sets goals, approve ideas, and manages the budget
Project managers: manage and schedule meetings, collect information, create and manage documentation, and coordinate the team
Business analysts: analyze collected research data, identify market trends, and present solutions
Solution architect: builds the solution strategy for each stated problem
Tech lead: determines the technical feasibility of discovered solutions, makes decisions regarding the required tech stack, and supervises developers
UI/UX experts: create the UI/UX for the chosen solutions
Backend engineers: provide estimates for backend tasks in the feature breakdown list and generate and assess solution ideas
QA estimators: provide estimates for quality assurance tasks from the feature breakdown list
Another essential participant in the product discovery process is the customer. Customers source the research phase with valuable information from their experience and give insights for creating new solutions. In addition, actual customer feedback on delivered prototypes is vital for the following product development iterations.
The product discovery Framework
The stages of the product discovery process might be named or split differently, but the overall framework follows a similar trajectory that product teams at most startups use. This makes the process of product discovery something worth internalizing, as it won’t change much from project to project. The time you spend on each stage might vary depending on your exact methodology or overall product strategy, but not the stages themselves.
Product discovery Steps
Here are the 7 stages of the product discovery process:
Pre-Discovery Process
Discovery Preparation
Problem Discovery
Problem Prioritization
Solution Generation
Solution Prioritization
Experimentation
What’s the goal of the product discovery process?
As we mentioned in chapter one of this guide, product discovery is a crucial stage of product design and development. The process allows designers and researchers to gain deep insight into their target audience and wholly understand their problems and perspectives—and in turn, design the best product to help.
Without the right product discovery process in place, you can waste time and resources creating a solution your user doesn’t want and won’t use.
Truly succinct and easy way to understand the importance of product discovery.