Product Discovery
Building the RIGHT product
In most organizations, product managers spend less than 20% of their time on discovery and the rest on delivery. This often results in building features and products nobody wants.
Product Discovery is vital to identify user problems worth solving and validate potential solutions in a lean way to save time & money.
Only opportunities that were successfully validated in the discovery phase should afterward be considered to be built properly with your team of engineers and shipped to all your customers.
If you do not yet work in a hypothesis-driven product environment (that values experiments and data-driven decision-making), start small by blocking half a day per week in your calendar to spend on discovery topics and make positive results transparent in your organization.
Typically the discovery process consists of 5 phases:
- Problem Research: What user problems/product opportunities exist?
- Solution Ideation: How could a solution look like to address the identified user problem?
- Prototyping: How does a prototype look like that lets you validate your solution?
- Solution Validation: Which validation experiments do you want to run with your prototype?
- Solution Refinement: How can you refine your solution?
In the following chapters, we explore each phase in detail.
Further Resources
- New York Times / Stanford Uni reference guide to product discovery: pdmethods.com
- Collection of discovery frameworks and how-to instructions: designkit.org/methods
- herbig.co/product-discovery
- Experiment Cookbook Cheatsheet
- How much Discovery should you do?