Introduction to Product Discovery

#43: A brief guide to planning and executing product discovery initiatives

Welcome to Fundament, a weekly product design newsletter where we share actionable tips and insightful stories with the worldwide design community.

The essence of product making is knowing what people will use and pay for. Without learning about the users’ and customers’ needs and validating whether the ideas really address these, one can’t build a successful and lasting product. According to the latest data, 90% of startups fail, while poor product-market fit is the top reason (34%) for this higher-than-ever failure rate.

Product discovery is an umbrella term for various activities teams can put effort into to ensure what they build is worth building. If you don’t have much experience with user research and validating ideas, this term can be a little overwhelming. But don’t worry, I’ve got you covered. This article will help you fight the fear. Together, we are going to plan and execute your first product design initiative.

Before we begin: a little disclaimer

What do product discovery and physics have in common? Both these disciplines involve some experimentation. And maybe something else, too.

One of my favorite professors of physics, Andrzej Dragan, describes the process of learning advanced physics by using an analogy to raise children. When they are young, parents don’t tell them the entire truth (or even lie in good will). While they grow up, parents and teachers would unwind those lies and show how the world truly works. The same principle applies to learning physics. In elementary and middle school, we are taught classic mechanics. Things start to look slightly different at the university when quantum mechanics is introduced.

In this article, I want to apply the same analogy to make learning product discovery smoother. I will lie to you just a little, and hopefully things aren’t overwhelming and terrifying.

Product discovery: what is it and when to do it?

Product discovery is at its core about finding answers to critical questions:

1. Who’s our user?

2. What are they struggling with?

3. What’s the current solution to this struggle?

4. What’s our value proposition for solving this problem?

5. What features are needed to solve the problem?

If we look at a classic double diamond design process, we could assume that product discovery lives in the first and some part of the second diamond. Product teams don’t know much (or anything) yet and have some assumptions about the customer’s pain points. Before they jump into the second part of the second diamond (Deliver), they need to validate their assumptions and make sure they build the right thing.

Let’s inspect the following example:

The product team is building an advanced to-do list app used by B2B customers. Over the last six months, in various conversations with customers, the commercial team noticed that there’s a new opportunity to build a feature and bring value to the users. Customers grumble over the lack of a way to see what their colleagues changed in their to-do lists.

“Easy! We should add a notification feature!” – says one of the engineers after hearing feedback from the commercial team. Is it a good idea to jump into the solutions space immediately and build a new feature?

That’d be a hard no.

Instead, the team should use product discovery magic* and gather more evidence. The team already has the answers to the first and second questions. Now, they need to find the answers to the three remaining ones.

Methods and techniques

The team is now somewhere in the first diamond (Discover and Define). They know what the customers struggle with, but are unsure how to solve it. To make a better and data-informed decision, they need to run a product discovery initiative using one of the most popular techniques:

• Market research and competitive analysis

• Rapid prototyping

• Customer interviews

• Fake door tests

Let’s look at each and discuss a step-by-step plan of implementing it.