Product Discovery Tips for Building Solutions

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 that users actually want and need. In this article, I share my recommendations to help you reflect on and improve your product discovery work.

Product discovery is a relatively new concept in the history of software development. It was only made possible by the introduction of agile development practices. Product discovery is the very first stage of the product development journey. It doesn’t just inform the way you build your product—it tells you whether you should build one in the first place

‍What Is Product Discovery?

Product discovery is a process of rooting into the mind and emotions of your target market to understand exactly who they are, what they care about, and all of the problems they wished they could solve.

Those problems will lead you to discover the solutions they require and the products that must be created to deliver them.

Product discovery is the process of closely understanding what your users’ problems and needs are, then validating your ideas for solutions before starting development. By forming a close relationship with your users and letting them guide your design thinking, your overall product strategy is much more likely to end up solving real-user problems.

Regardless of where product ideas come from, they must be weighed against fresh customer insights and reliable data. What you think you "know" about your customers should be rephrased as what you “hypothesize” about your customers. And then move to the next step: conduct empirical research.

There are 2 types of data you can collect:

• Qualitative: Qualitative data is subject and is all about how your customers and prospects feel about your brand and products.

• Quantitative: Quantitative data is all about the numbers, this kind of data will give you direct insights into customer behavior, and when cross-checked with qualitative data, will begin to form a clear picture of who your customer is and exactly what they want.

Why is Product Discovery Important

Your customers are the only people who can tell you if what you are thinking of building will be a success or not. Validating your ideas before building code is:

• cheaper as no development resources are wasted.

• faster as you don’t develop a feature for an extended period of time before potentially finding out that nobody wants to use it.

• more successful in the long term as you only build things that are adding value to your product. This avoids unnecessary clutter. A feature that nobody uses is not only wasted time and money. It can also be detrimental to the overall experience.

• incremental learning as you build up knowledge about your customers and can assess ideas more quickly.

Tips for Effective Product Discovery

The product discovery process is messy, sometimes confusing, and different for every business and market. That doesn’t mean there aren’t a few fundamentals you can use to make it easier and more effective.

‍1. Begin by Empathizing With Your Audience

Empathy should always be the starting point in product discovery. It forces you to look through your customers’ eyes and see the world as they do. The goal is to eliminate projection, assumption, and "intuition" and replace them with accurate observation and genuine understanding.

The process will give you a robust image you can use to pinpoint the problem they need to be solved, the solution they require, and the right way to package it into a product they would buy.

2. Uncover Customer Problems

You’ll need to remain hyper-curious about all the challenges your customers want to overcome because if you don’t, your competitors will.

• Survey your customers.

• Conduct customer interviews.

• Monitor social media.

• Collect reviews.

• Listen to customer complaints.

3. Don’t Settle for the First Solution

Coming up with an idea to solve your customer’s problem is easy. But that initial idea is probably not the right one to make into a product. It’s really easy and feels really good to move forward on the first idea presented (especially if it’s yours), but you have to verify that it matches more than one dimension of what the customer wants.

Map your solution idea to the opportunities you find by analyzing the market and your customers. The act of identifying and drawing the map is a reminder of the customer’s actual needs and mitigates the risk of teams running with an idea and forgetting about the preferences of the people they’re building the solution for in the first place.

The benefits of product discovery

Like many best practices of modern product development, a lot of the product discovery process seems like common sense. But as the fall of Quibi shows, the benefits of investing time into product discovery are still often overlooked to this day. So let’s take a look at some of the main ones:

Save Time and Money

Product teams spending weeks or months doing a lot of thinking and not very much building might seem counterintuitive to the fast startup culture they exist in. The demands of key stakeholders to drive metrics and business goals by shipping new products is a constant pressure for most product teams.

Product discovery gives you validation on whether your product needs to exist before spending a lot of money building, polishing, and marketing it. It makes you more agile, not less.

Build more Innovative Products

By incorporating customer viewpoints from the beginning, product discovery inspires your team to challenge their own assumptions and think outside of the box when making product decisions. This doesn’t just lead to more innovative solutions—it also validates which of your ideas are market opportunities.

Get Great Feedback for your Development Team and Product Designers

Product discovery gives you a good idea of whether your new product or feature will be used. And for product designers and developers, seeing their creations help thousands or even millions of people is one of the best parts of the job. Without product discovery, your team members won’t get the feedback they crave.

Final Thoughts - Don’t Limit Product Discovery to New Products

While the traditional usage of the term suggests that product discovery is the first stage in a new product development process, it would be a mistake to limit product discovery to new products.

As your product grows and matures, its value proposition, market, stand-out features, and business model will change. To make and keep your product successful, it is paramount that you proactively review and adjust your product strategy, roadmap, and business model. These adjustments sometimes require little or no product discovery work.