Product Discovery

What is product discovery?

Product discovery is all about validating your assumptions, identifying the user problems you want to solve, and exploring potential solutions. It’s an essential phase of the product development lifecycle, focusing on understanding user needs, market demands, and your technological capabilities before committing to building a product.

The discovery process is integral to product development, typically starting just after the initial ideation phase, but before you get into more detailed design and development work. From then on, it ideally continues to run parallel to the delivery track (a process known as continuous discovery, or ‘dual track agile’).

In practice, product discovery can be seen as the attempt to answer to following questions:

• Desirability: Do users and the market want this product?
• Feasibility: Can we build this product effectively with the technology and resources available?
• Viability: Will this product meet our business goals and be sustainable in the long term?

By thoroughly exploring these questions and validating your answers, you can confidently move into the next phases of your product’s development. Integrating product discovery into your product development process also helps to reduce the risk that you’re building the wrong product.

This phase is, by necessity, characterized by a high level of uncertainty, creativity, and a need for agility. You and your team will have to be ready to pivot based on what you learn, sometimes dramatically, to ensure both that you’re working on something you know people want, and that they’ll be willing to pay for your solution.

What is the purpose of product discovery?

Product discovery has a number of objectives, though its core intent is to ensure that your product team invests their time and resources into developing a product that will be successful in the market.

Here are the main goals of product discovery:

• Aligning product goals with user needs
• Validating market demand and product-market fit
• Mitigating risks
• Prioritizing features
• Fostering innovation
• Building the right product

Let’s take a deeper look at what each of these goals entails:

Aligning product vision with user needs

The discovery phase aims to align the product vision with actual user needs, ensuring that the development efforts lead to a product that users find valuable and are willing to adopt.

Validating market demand and product-market fit

Before committing time and money to building a product, it’s crucial to validate that people actually want the solution you are proposing. Product discovery helps to confirm that there are enough potential users out there who experience the problem that your product hopes to solve.

One of the ultimate goals of product discovery is to determine and enhance your product-market fit. By understanding your users, their problems and needs, you can tailor your product to meet them more precisely, leading to better adoption and customer satisfaction.

Mitigating risks

Developing a new product is inherently risky, and potentially expensive. Product discovery helps to mitigate these risks and costs by validating your ideas and assumptions early on, which can prevent costly mistakes and scope creep.

By thoroughly researching and testing assumptions, product discovery reduces the uncertainties associated with product development. It allows you to make informed decisions based on evidence gathered from real user feedback and market data.

Prioritizing features

Discovery helps in identifying and prioritizing the ideas that will deliver the most value to users. This prioritization is essential for focusing your efforts and resources on what is most important and impactful.

Fostering innovation

The explorative nature of product discovery encourages innovative thinking. It provides a structured approach to brainstorming and validating new ideas that could help you beat your competitors to the next big thing.

Saving time and resources

Although it may seem counterintuitive, spending time on product discovery can and will save you time and resources in the long run. By identifying the right problems to solve and the right solutions to build from the off, you’ll avoid wasting your team’s time on ideas that won’t work.

A well-conducted product discovery process can also streamline the subsequent development process by providing clear direction and reducing the need for major revisions later on.

Building the right product

The overarching purpose of product discovery is to build the right product – the one that users need and will use. This focus on building the right product from the get-go is cheaper, more efficient, and more effective than trying to fix a product that you built based on incorrect assumptions.

By setting a strong foundation through product discovery, your team will be more likely to create successful products that resonate with your users, meet business objectives, and sustainably succeed in the market.

What is the product discovery process?

The product discovery process is a series of iterative steps that product teams undertake to help them identify the best way to solve their targeted problems in a way that will provide the best value to their users.

It’s also a cyclical process of learning, testing, and refining, aimed at minimizing the risk of developing a product that does not meet user needs or business goals.

Product discovery often follows what’s known as the Double Diamond process. It’s a visual framework that helps to provide you with a structured approach to navigating the uncertainty of creating something new.

The Double Diamond consists of four distinct phases — two divergent or exploratory phases where the aim is to generate a wide range of ideas and possibilities (represented by the widening of the diamond), and two convergent phases where the goal is to narrow down these possibilities and focus on the most viable options (represented by the narrowing of the diamond).

Here’s how each phase of the Double Diamond framework applies to the product discovery process:

Phase 1: Discover

The first diamond represents understanding the problem space:

• Market research: Identifying market trends and understanding the competitive landscape.
• User research: Engaging with users to discover their needs, behaviors, and pain points.
• Stakeholder interviews: Understanding business requirements and constraints.

This phase is crucial for ensuring that you are solving the right problems. It’s about opening up to as many possibilities or problems as possible without judgment or the need to find immediate solutions.

Phase 2: Define

The second phase is about defining the problem that needs solving:

• Data analysis: Analyzing understanding the data collected during the Discover phase to identify core user needs and problems.
• Problem framing: Clearly defining the problem you plan to solve.
• Prioritization: Deciding which problems are worth solving first using frameworks like Teresa Torres’ Opportunity Solution Tree. Consider the impact on the user and the business value.

This phase means translating insights into a clear problem statement that guides the ideation process. It involves converging on a clear direction for the product based on user needs and business goals, and developing a strategy for achieving your goals.

Phase 3: Develop

The third phase represents ideation, where solutions are developed:

• Brainstorming: Generating a broad range of ideas and potential solutions.
• Prototyping: Building prototypes and MVPs to explore how different ideas might work in reality.
• Gathering user feedback: Testing these prototypes with users to find out what they think and what you can improve.

This phase is creative and expansive, exploring as many potential solutions as possible and experimenting to see which ideas have merit.

Phase 4: Deliver

The final phase focuses on delivering the solution:

• User validation: Refining prototypes and solutions based on user testing.
• Determining the solution: Deciding on the most viable product or feature that solves the problem.
• Development and launch: Building and launching the final product or feature.

This is the final convergent phase, where you commit to a solution and focus on getting that solution into the users’ hands. It involves detailed design, development, quality assurance, and deployment.

Throughout the Double Diamond process, product teams constantly learn and refine their understanding of both the problem and the solution. This iterative approach is key to product discovery, ensuring that what is built is truly what users need and that it delivers value to the business. It aligns closely with the principles of Agile and Lean methodologies, emphasizing user feedback, iterative development, and a flexible approach to product creation.

ProdPad Co-Founder and CEO Janna Bastow has written up a step-by-step guide on how to set up a product discovery process for yourself, and we also have a list of our top product research tools to help you along.

Challenges in product discovery

Product discovery can be fraught with difficulties that teams need to navigate carefully. Identifying these common obstacles and implementing strategies to deal with them is essential for successful product discovery.

Here are some of the issues you may encounter, and a suggested approach to combating them.

Unclear problem definitions

One of the main challenges is the lack of a clearly expressed problem definition. Without a well-defined problem, your discovery efforts can be unfocused and ineffective.

Solution: Use structured frameworks like Jobs-to-be-Done to clearly articulate the user problem before seeking solutions.

Resistance to change

Organizations may resist the changes suggested by discovery findings, especially if they deviate significantly from the initial plan or vision.

Solution: Build a culture of flexibility and demonstrate the value of being data-driven and user-centric to encourage buy-in for change.

Information overload

Teams can become overwhelmed with data and insights, leading to analysis paralysis where no decisions are made.

Solution: Prioritize data and focus on actionable insights. Set clear objectives for what you need to learn and use tools like ProdPad to manage and visualize data effectively.

Confirmation bias

People have a tendency to seek out information that confirms their pre-existing beliefs or hypotheses, which can lead to skewed results.

Solution: Actively seek out evidence that challenges your assumptions, and encourage everyone to keep an open mind about what will turn out to be the right approach to take.

Difficulty in prioritization

With numerous potential features and user needs, it can be challenging to decide what to focus on first.

Solution: Use a prioritization framework to objectively assess the importance and urgency of each feature or initiative.

Balancing Speed with Rigor

There is often a push to move quickly and produce more in today’s fast-paced business environment, which can be at odds with the need to be thorough in discovery.

Solution: Emphasize the importance of speed in learning rather than in delivering, and balance quick experiments with in-depth research where necessary.

Inadequate user access

Gaining access to users for research purposes can be difficult, especially for new products or markets.

Solution: Explore alternative methods of user engagement, such as an online feedback portal, engaging with social media, or partnering with organizations that have access to your target users.

Misalignment with stakeholders

Your various stakeholders might have different visions for the product, which can lead to conflicting directions.

Solution: Regularly communicate findings and involve stakeholders in the discovery process to build consensus and buy-in.

Maintaining focus

It can be easy to get sidetracked by all the very interesting but somewhat less relevant insights, or to fall in love with a particular idea or solution.

Solution: Stay grounded in user needs and business goals, and be willing to set aside less relevant insights for later consideration.

Scaling discovery findings

Translating findings from a small user group to a broader market can be challenging, as initial users may not be representative.

Solution: Validate findings across more diverse user segments and consider conducting broader market research to help ensure your product’s scalability.

By anticipating these challenges and having strategies in place to address them when they come up, you’ll ensure a more effective and efficient product discovery process. It’s crucial to remain adaptable, data-informed, and user-focused throughout to navigate these challenges successfully.