Product Discovery Part 1.

We all have heard about agile Product delivery etc but there is an element which is missing in product life cycle. And that bit is Product Discovery. Product Discovery answers the question "Should we build it" before going to "Can we build this".

Normally what happens is features are decided by leadership and then they are prioritized and then we start building from the top of this list. This is how most teams work but the underlying assumption here is : Whatever we are building is needed by our customers , customers would like to pay for it and we know our customers very well since we have been working with them since so long. We might also have customer research team OR may be user insights team or something similar whose job is to tell us what customers think and what they want etc.

My only question here is : How much money is spent before we realize that we were wrong OR what we built was actually not needed OR we thought this product will generate 100K $ in first 6 months but it has generated only 42K $ etc.

Think about it, Which statement sounds better : "We spent 1000 $ and proved that this is the wrong idea" OR "We have spent 100K$ and proved that this is the wrong idea". Believe me , if you say the latter , your CFO will come down from her office and would like to talk to you :))

Now, I am not asserting that it is right or wrong but I wanted to share a different ( and may be new) perspective of effective product management.

Product discovery is very different from product delivery. Product discovery is about understanding deeply how customer's think , believe and possibly use our product. It is about understanding customer's world. There has to be continuous user and market research. And it is not only the responsibility of some isolated team, every team member in product team should participate in that research and interviews.

Some of the techniques are :

Customer journey maps ( more on this will come soon......... ),

Empathy maps ( Here we focus on what our customers are thinking , what are they seeing , what are they doing and how they are feeling ) : Rather than solving the challenge from my or your's perspective , everybody on the team aligns around solving the challenge from customer's perspective.

Customer Personas ( These are demographics which represent your customer segments. They talk about what are their goals , what are their motivations, what are their current conditions , where they want to go etc )

The basic premise here is that we are not sitting inside the building and thinking what to built rather we are into the field getting real data from real people so that we can make informed decisions and ideas emerge.

Now, let us talk about design thinking as well because it relates closely with how product discovery can be done. Design Thinking (DT) is an umbrella term which people use to describe problem solving approach that begins with understand the people and their REAL problems and ends with the solutions that are tailored to them. Some people also call DT as HCD (Human Centered Design) or UXD (User Experience Design) and some other terms. There are 5 basic steps to do DT and they are : Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test.

These five steps are done within a week (at max) because we do not want our customers to say "I know this is exactly what i said in requirements doc but now that i see it practically , i am not sure i really need this". This puts us and our customers in an awkward situation. Hence , we can try to build failure immunity where our customers are happy that we failed in 2 days so that now we know what doesn't work and as a result we can try something else.

Design thinking tends to build failure immunity. David Kelly said "you have to fail fast if you have to succeed sooner". I will talk more about Design thinking in the next article.

Let's finish up by touching on different ways to test our ideas (which is an integral part of Product Discovery) which are : Smoke selling (it is a one page landing page which describes the product and request the visitor to sign up to a mailing list. Here you can do very quick iterations by changing the product or feature descriptions etc) , Test using Product Demo Video (Dropbox is a great example for this. You can search on YouTube for it.), Test using the Concierge test (here we cater to user's request manually. Example is Zappos. Currently Zappos is one of the largest online shoe stores in the world. How they started is by going to a local shoe store and clicking photos of shoes. Put those pics on the website page. If anyone clicks to purchase the shoes from them , they would physically go to shoes store , purchase the shoes and mail them to customers.