What is Product Discovery and why is it important

Have you ever wondered why some products succeed in the market and others turn out to be failures? One of the most common reasons why startups fail is because there is no market need for that solution. How to avoid this situation in your project?

The solution is to become more customer-centric and choose an approach that helps you create products that respond to user needs. Conducting the Product Discovery process is one way to help you do that.

Product discovery – proving that the problem exists

What is product discovery? It’s one of the first phases of product development. It involves a careful examination of whether the problem we want to solve actually exists for our potential customers and how we should do it. In fact, what we do here is proving that the problem exists and we’re able to solve it with a particular product or feature. It helps the product team to deeply understand the needs of users and customers and to refine their ideas. 

The foundation of this process is constant testing of ideas as well as learning how our market works and what users really need. The goal is always to:

• understand and define users’ problems 
• validate the solution ideas of the team 
• create solutions that address the actual expectations of customers/users
• reduce risks occurring before, during and after the product development. 

Any idea for a product or feature can actually turn out to be a bad one, so before we decide to implement it, we should get proof that it’s actually valuable for the target audience. 

Beneficial results for the development process and the product team

Product discovery should be an integral part at the beginning of any app development project. It will allow you to predefine your audience and their needs. The result of the product discovery process can also be very helpful in case of outsourcing the task to an external company as well as in case of changing the team in any way. The product team is not only a group of developers. They need to know what the focus groups of users look like, where they can find them and what their needs are to advise, design and create the product that actually meets the requirements. 

So what are the actual results of the product discovery process? 

• Defined problems – the customers’ and users’ problems are now seen, understood and defined, so we can start resolving them,
• Ready-made solutions – during the process, solution ideas appear. Then, these ideas need to be validated (we have to check if they respond to users’ problems), and if they turn out to be beneficial, we have the solution on place,
• Reduced risks – there are many risks in software development: the solution might turn out to be irrelevant, users might simply not like it, they might think it’s too expensive, they might not know how to use it and, what’s also important, we might not be able to deliver the solution, due to budget, staff or resources limitations. Product discovery, done right, will eliminate these risks as all of these aspects will be considered. 

Stages of product discovery process

Let’s dig into each of the product discovery process stages to help you understand it and walk through it step by step. 

1. Defining the strategy 

It’s like the first sentence of your product description:

• Why are you building this product? 

• What is its purpose? 

• What effect do you want to achieve?

This is what defining the product strategy is about. Product managers, along with the whole team, should always think the whole strategy through to even start thinking about the product development process itself. Obvious? Not really. A pretty big number of companies fail with their software projects because they didn’t have a straight and complete product strategy set. 

2. Identifying possible solutions 

It’s time to do some overall research concerning the users and possible solutions for their problems. You’ll need to answer these questions:

• Who is the user of the product? 

• What problems does he/she have? 

• How can you solve them?

When it comes to identifying the users of your product, what might be especially helpful is creating the user persona. It describes your best or ideal type of customers (users). How to do it? You can find out in our 5-steps guide for mobile app creators. 

3. Prototyping 

Prototyping means proposing specific solutions for each problem and checking its viability in general. Questions guiding through this stage would be:

• How can you solve a specific user problem? 

• What will be the effect of such a solution? 

• Which of the possible solutions to the problem will be the best?

4. Verifying ideas 

Now that you have written down your ideas, proposed some solutions, you should check if these are the good ones in detail. It’s important to engage users at this point, for example with customer interviews. 

• Are your ideas actually good? 

• What do your users think about them? 

• Can we actually solve their problems?

When verifying ideas, it’s also a good idea to check if the verified solution already exists on the market. That’s why you should do the competitors' analysis. Competitive analysis will help you identify opportunities to outperform the competition, find out what the industry standards are, determine what is valuable to your target market and get to know how you can stand out from the crowd with your solution.

5. Prioritization and planning 

Strategy is set, users are met, solutions proposed and checked. Now it’s time for the prioritization and planning stage, where you’ll need to decide:

• Which of the proposed ideas will you implement? 

• Which functionalities should you deliver first? 

• What is the scope of your MMP (Minimum Marketable Product) or MVP (Minimum Viable Product)?

That’s because it doesn’t happen very often that all of the verified ideas can be implemented at once. This could concern really small projects (or really bad ideas). In other cases, you’ll have to prioritize. At this stage, the customer insights are collected and we know their pain points and frustrations related with their problems, so we can deliver the expected business value by creating the product roadmap and proceeding with building the product. 

What’s the product team?

This phrase was used several times in the article. But do you actually know what it means?

Product team, development team, management team… They are often confused. We’re usually using these names interchangeably, but maybe it’s not a very good idea. Because there is a difference. 

The most important thing is that all the teams involved in a project work closely together. The better the collaboration, the better the product creation itself, because when every person on every team understands why and for whom the product is being built, they can offer their perspective and ideas. 

Development team

The development team, as the name would suggest, are people who work on product development itself – designers, developers, QA testers etc. With the right approach to product development, the team will also be aware of the purposes of each feature. That’s how they can also put their value in the idea, but  their main goal, at this point (during the development), is to deliver a quality product that meets the requirements.

Project management 

Product managers, or the management team, on the other hand, are responsible for the management of product teams’ work, to make the process of development run smoothly, to meet the deadlines, etc. Their responsibilities include organizing tasks so that the product delivery ends successfully. 

Product team

What I would call a product team, would be the whole team working on the product idea, idea validation, development, prototyping and testing – so the discovery team, project managers, developers, UI/UX designers and quality assurance testers. Fun fact: yes, these can be the same people who were involved in the development of the product and management. The suggested names for all of the groups will simply make it easier to understand different processes that happen around products’ discovery, development, release and maintenance. 

Conclusion

The product discovery process should be a part of every software development project. Don’t be afraid to involve customer interviews, surveys and other means that will bring you closer to product users and discover customer needs. Listening to customer feedback and analyzing customer data might be the best way to move your project to the right track and to find solutions for their problems, which means to become a successful business!

Do the market research, analyze customer behavior, interview users, create user stories, validate and implement. There is a huge difference between building the right thing and building the thing right.