Product Discovery
Stay curious. Explore divergent perspectives. Keep defining and shaping the problem space.
What is product discovery?
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 development 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 analytics software is key to product discovery.
The product discovery process is important because it helps teams build products that are vital to their customers, not simply nice to have. A necessary product is one that solves such a deep and genuine need for the customer that they feel unable to live without it. Examples range from Google search to smartphones to duct tape. Many of them evolve into verbs, as in “Google it.” The advantage here is obvious: Necessities enjoy higher demand and greater success.
The difference between a necessity and a ‘nice to have’ product is an effective product discovery. When companies fail at this, it’s often because “they weren’t thorough enough in their customer research and based their product on assumptions not backed by evidence,” says Josh Decker-Trinidad, a product designer and researcher at General Assembly.
The three steps of product discovery
1. Challenge your assumptions
The first step to improving your product discovery process is challenging the assumptions that underlie your current methods. For example, do your product initiatives typically come top-down from the executive team? That assumes they know what’s best for customers, which they may not. Does your product team prioritize features based on past experience? That assumes their domain expertise outweighs fresh customer insights, which it may not. Get your team’s assumptions on the table, rephrase them as hypotheses, and test them with data.
2. Conduct empirical user research
There are two types of customer data with which to test your assumptions: qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative data is subjective and comes from surveys, customer interviews, and focus groups, and generally measures customers’ sentiment and intent. This data helps companies develop empathy for their users and learn to think from their perspective.
Pro tip: To spread an empathetic understanding of your customer, involve all teams – from marketing to engineering – in interviews and qualitative data collection.
Quantitative data is numerical and may come from user data and testing. It’s the “data” people talk about when they refer to data-driven decisions and it’s critical for testing the validity of your assumptions.
Take, for example, a social media app that assumes that enlarging a ‘share’ button will increase sharing. If the team doesn’t first test the results against a control group, everything they build later on which involves that feature will be founded on potentially false assumptions. It’s a house of cards waiting to come down. Untested assumptions skew design results and lead to poor performance.
Product analytics can quickly test your assumptions: A good product analytics platform is designed to collect and analyze user data to automatically reach conclusions in a fraction of the time that it takes to do it manually.
3. Create design artifacts
Product discovery artifacts help companies keep their user data top of mind. They are ‘living documents’ and should be habitually updated, improved, and referred to throughout the product discovery process. Three examples of product discovery artifacts:
Journey map: This is a literal map of the user’s journey, with “actions” as the locations along the road to their goal. It is absolutely critical that these be based on empirical user research. More often than not, journey maps are created by one or two people within the company based on little more than experience and intuition. Inaccurate journey maps can lead companies astray.
Empathy map: An empathy map is a four-quadrant diagram of the customer in which companies record what their customers think, hear, see, and say that ties back to the customer’s challenges and opportunities. This will help develop a firm sense of how your products and services make users feel.
Consumer persona: A consumer persona is an approximation of a segment of your users, such as ‘power users’ or ‘aspiring amateurs.’ Most personas take the form of a catchy name followed by a list of demographics, psychographics, and behaviors that help companies visualize the customer as they design.
Pick the goal you would like to achieve:
Understand the Opportunity
Understand the User
Understand the Problem
Confirm the Problem
Identify Possible Solutions
Narrow the Field
Create Tests
Validate with Users
Pivot on Learnings
Reading list for Product Discovery:
Jared Spool on Building a winning product and UX strategy from the Kano Model (Talk)
Philipp Krehl on Product Discovery or Product Delivery (Article)
https://pdmethods.com/
https://svpg.com/product-discovery-plan/
https://svpg.com/feed-the-beast/
https://svpg.com/insights/product/discovery/