Product Discovery Tips
Product discovery refers to the activities required to determine if and why a product should be developed. Carrying out this work makes it more likely to create a product users actually want and need. In this article, I share my recommendations to help you reflect on and improve your product discovery work.
Bring the Right People Together
Product discovery is a team sport. You should therefore involve the right people in the discovery work and secure enough of their time. I find it helpful to form a product discovery team that consists of:
- Development team members: user experience (UX) designer, developer, tester;
- Key stakeholders, for example, people from marketing, sales, and support;
- A ScrumMaster or agile coach.
Involving others in the discovery work allows you to leverage their knowledge and expertise, builds rapport, and creates support for key product decisions including the selection of a specific market segment and stand-out features.
A UX designer, for example, might help you observe and interview users; and a developer and tester might advise you on technical feasibility, identify technical risks, and build prototypes; a sales rep might get you in touch with target users and help you with competitor research; a ScrumMaster might facilitate collaboration and advise on process issues — for instance, which process and tools should be best used to visualize and track the discovery work. (I prefer to use a Kanban-based process and a Kanban board, as I discuss in my book Strategize in more detail.)
Focus on Problem Validation, not Solution Building
Your product discovery work should focus on nailing the value proposition, target group, business goals, business model, and stand-out features of the product — not on writing user stories, designing the user interface, or building the actual solution. Your goal should be to mitigate the risk of building a product nobody wants and needs, not to figure out the product details.
Having said that, it’s ok to address key UX and technology risks and evaluate important user interaction and architecture options as part of the discovery work. But the bulk of the UX design, user story writing, and technology work should be done after you have successfully validated the problem.
To get your focus right, consider using a tool like my Product Vision Board to capture your idea, and identify assumptions and risks.
Do Just-Enough Product Discovery Work
Minimise the amount of time you spend on product discovery in order to accelerate time-to-market. You should aim to get a good enough product out as fast as possible, and then adapt it to the market feedback. There is no way to guarantee that the product strategy and business model are spot on, and that the new product or next version will be a success.
But don’t rush the necessary work, and resist the temptation to jump start building the actual product. Explore the key assumptions and risks in your product strategy and business model by systematically testing and addressing them in an iterative fashion using, for example, observations, interviews, surveys, and prototypes.
If you can’t confidently state why people are going to use your product, who those individuals are, what makes your product stand out from the crowd, and why it’s worthwhile for your business to develop and provide the product, then you are not in a position to build the actual solution. Instead, continue the discovery work (persevere or pivot), or stop and move on to another product idea.
Talk to the Users
With all the product discovery work that needs to happen, it can be easy to lose sight of the most important success factor — the people who are going to use the product. There is no point in coming up with a smart business model and sophisticated user interactions, if you don’t know who the users are, what they may be struggling with, and what works well for them, and what doesn’t. If the users don’t need and like your product, you will find it hard to monetise it and achieve product success.
Therefore, get out of the building (as Steve Blank says) and meet target users face-to-face as part of the discovery work. I know that’s not always easy to do. But to succeed with product discovery, I find it paramount that you — the person in charge of the product — carry out user research yourself and develop a deep understanding of the user needs.
When talking to users, take a genuine interest in the people you meet. Have an open mind and let go of preconceived notions about the problem you think the users have or the solution you believe they need. This allows you to discover what people really want and need thereby maximising the chances of creating a successful product.
Read On …
To read the rest of this article and access the remaining tips, please head over to my website: https://www.romanpichler.com/blog/product-discovery-tips/
Learn More
To learn more about product discovery, attend my Product Strategy and Roadmap training course and read my book Strategize.
Source: https://www.romanpichler.com/blog/product-discovery-tips/
