Product Discovery Explained
Why Effectively Validating Problems And Solutions Matters
Product discovery helps product teams figure out the right things to build. It’s the cornerstone of successful product development. Everything a product team creates is in response to some meaningful, unmet customer need. Product discovery provides a structured process to uncover these needs and develop solutions that effectively address them. However, product discovery is often just considered “research work,” which undermines its real value.
When companies build products without product discovery, they often find that their features have little to no adoption, requiring teams to rebuild things and commit more time, energy, and resources to solve the same problems. This is incredibly frustrating for customers, product teams, and businesses. Product discovery can help teams avoid these situations and make product decisions with greater confidence by helping them validate problems and potential solutions. It can be a powerful tool that can transform how teams build products.
What Is Product Discovery?
Product discovery is the process of deeply understanding customer problems and identifying the best way to solve them, before committing to development. Each customer problem represents an opportunity to create value for customers and the business. The discovery process allows product teams to systematically understand what their target users truly need so they can decide what to build. Furthermore, it helps them identify, evaluate, and validate the opportunity and potential solutions.
“First, you need to discover whether there are real users out there that want this product. In other words, you need to identify your market and validate the opportunity with your customers. Second, you need to discover a product solution to this problem that is usable, useful, and feasible. In other words, you need to design your product and validate it with your customers and your engineering team”
— Marty Cagan, Silicon Valley Product Group
Terms and Definitions
Product discovery involves a range of activities. While it’s often used interchangeably with other related terms, understanding the difference between specific activities can help product teams assess the full scope of their product discovery process.
Product Discovery is the overall process used to deeply understand customer needs, identify valuable opportunities, and explore potential solutions for creating/improving a product. The goal is to help product teams define what to build, for whom, and why, focusing on delivering value to users and the business.
User Research is a component of product discovery that focuses on understanding user behaviors, needs, motivations, and preferences in depth. The goal is to understand users deeply to help product teams design products that meet their expectations and effectively solve their problems.
User Experience (UX) Research is a subset of user research that focuses on how users interact with, respond to, and feel about your product or feature. The goal is to help product teams understand how to design products and features that are useable, intuitive, and efficient.
Market Research is a component of product discovery that focuses on understanding the market for a product or feature. It involves analyzing market trends, customer demographics, buying behaviors, etc. The goal is to help product teams evaluate the opportunity (demand, market size, market value, etc.) associated with a product or feature.
Competitor Analysis is a subset of market research that focuses on analyzing competitors to understand their strengths, weaknesses, market positioning, and strategies. It involves examining competitor products, features, pricing, etc. The goal is to help product teams identify opportunities to differentiate and improve their product or feature.
Why Product Discovery Matters
It helps product teams be more productive.
Company executives want their teams to be productive. They often fear that discovery work can be a waste of time because it blocks development. Therefore, they push their product teams to are ship features because as long as they release something, they are being “productive.” However, this mindset often leads to features that no one uses or cares about. Therefore, it’s often more productive (and less expensive) to focus on building a good discovery process to first find the right solution – one that is usable, useful, and feasible – and then move forward with development. While iterations are unavoidable to some extent, good product discovery makes the team more likely to get closer to something customers actually want.
It helps product teams drive business outcomes.
Companies are ultimately interested in the business outcome of product work, such as increasing revenue, acquiring users, improving retention, etc. Good product teams recognize how the things they build impact customers and business outcomes. Product teams have to connect business outcomes to product outcomes that they can influence. They have to discover opportunities that drive their product outcome and discover solutions that will address those opportunities. For example, if a business outcome is to increase revenue, a product outcome may be to create a new paid feature that will attract users to sign up or upgrade their subscription plans.
It helps product teams evaluate whether problems are worth solving.
Product development is expensive. The time and energy spent building the wrong things cannot be recovered. The discovery process helps product teams determine whether they are building the right things. It allows them to identify a real, painful, and significant problem with a strong business case. It reveals issues related to demand, complexity, ROI, etc. Furthermore, it helps them evaluate if they can actually develop a solution. The discovery insights should clearly indicate whether they should move forward with solution development or not.
It helps product teams reduce the risk associated with product decisions.
Product teams want to ensures that they build products that are actually valuable to users. The discovery process allows the team to evaluate and mitigate four big risks when developing products/features.
Value Risk - Will people buy/use it?
Usability Risk - Will people be able to figure out how to use it?
Business Viability Risk - Will it work the various aspects of the business?
Feasibility Risk - Can we build what’s needed using the time, skills, and resources available?
The Product Discovery Process
Understanding the discovery process through the lens of the double diamond framework.
Product discovery is not a fixed process. The right process for your team depends on your product, your business, and your customers. However, we can generally break down the discovery process into two phases: the problem phase and the solution phase. The goal of each phase is to define and validate a distinct problem and solution respectively. The basic approach is to start by initially exploring as much as possible (diverging) before narrowing down (converging) on specific ideas. This process is commonly referred to as the Double Diamond Framework.
Problem Space
Understand - Empathize with users to learn what really matters to them.
The discovery process starts with identifying broad challenges that you are trying to solve. It’s always helpful to start with open-ended conversations with customers. Customers will naturally be more inclined to share more about things they really care about. If they are not sharing much you may need to get creative with how you ask them questions. The goal is to get into the mind of the user and understand their needs, their behaviors, and their challenges. When you understand how users act, think, and feel, you can evaluate their current experience more effectively.
Learn about your users (through interviews, observation, surveys, etc.).
Understand how different aspects of their current experience connect.
Map out their current experience (using journey maps, workflow diagrams, etc.).
Group user feedback around common themes (recurring issues, pain points, needs, etc.).
Define - Reflect on user experience insights and identify a real user problem.
Once you have a sense of the major needs and pain points, you need to translate these into problems that need to be solved. You should be able to articulate what each problem is and why it matters to justify potentially developing a solution. This helps us establish what needs to be done and why. While solving the problem should be worth it for the business, the primary goal is still to address a real user need. The goal should be to define a specific problem that the team can focus on during the solution development.
Define and validate problems that are valuable to the customer and the business.
Prioritize the problems based on business goals, cost vs. value, ICE, etc.
Get stakeholder feedback to determine the highest-value problem to solve.
Solution Space
Ideate - Generate multiple ideas before narrowing down on solutions.
A well-defined problem gives us a clear target to aim for when thinking about possible solutions. You have to figure out how to solve the problem. The solution should align with the customer’s expectations, motivations, and behavior. A hammer and a wrench can both push a nail into a wall but one definitely gets the job done better than the other. Use techniques like brainstorming, mind mapping, storyboarding, etc. The goal is to generate as many ideas as possible before narrowing down the best prospect.
Consider the customer perspective – When, how, and why would they use it?
Consider the business perspective – How does it impact the business goals?
Prioritize the solutions based on constraints, feasibility, impact, etc.
Identify a specific solution to prototype and test with customers.
Prototype - Build something to demonstrate the core ideas to users.
Prototyping allows us to evaluate ideas by giving people something real to interact with, which also makes it easier for them to give feedback. Prototypes don’t have to be refined or complex. They should just demonstrate the basic concepts of your solution by helping the user accomplish a specific task (related to their problem). While it can take various forms such as wireframes, mockups, demos, etc., it’s important to choose the right format to communicate the value proposition to your users.
Test - Test and validate solutions with users early on to refine them.
Testing allows teams to get user feedback to validate assumptions, identify issues, and refine ideas, before committing to further development. The goal is to validate if potential solutions actually solve the problem. It is vital to identify when you are going off track, so you can minimize (or hopefully eliminate) costly corrections and rework down the line. This ensures that your efforts are concentrated on the most valuable work.
Test prototypes with users to get their feedback on issues and improvements — What do they think? Where are they struggling? What is/is not resonating?
Identify usability and discoverability challenges — Do users engage with the solution as expected? Can they figure out how to use it? Can they find it?
Refine prototypes based on testing insights until you are confident you have created something that users actually want.
Conclusion
Product discovery is a continuous process crucial for building great products. It does not end after a product or feature is released. Products have to adapt to changes in customer needs, business goals, market conditions, etc. When product teams integrate product discovery into their development process, they ensure that their product stays closely aligned with what customers need. As teams continue to engage with customers, they discover new opportunities to evolve the product’s value proposition and deliver greater value for customers and the business.
Thanks For Reading
If you haven’t already, please consider subscribing and sharing this newsletter with a friend.
I hope you have a great week!