Role of Continuous Product Discovery in B2B Startup

The way CI / CD plays a crucial role in enhancing the SDLC, similarly continuous product discovery is crucial for understanding customers and building great products to thrive in the market.

Let's deep dive into what exactly is Continuous Product Discovery and how we used it in my current company.

Below are my key takeaways from a session on 'Scaling Product Discovery' in B2B SAAS by Nalin Goel

1. PRODUCT DISCOVERY

It's about understanding whether users will use our product, whether customers will buy it, and whether we have enough resources to build the right products and features for the customers.

2. WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

To define product direction, align with goals, and build what users need. To know if what we are building caters to the right and larger audience aligning with our business goals. Below are the several ways continuous discovery helps companies -

a. Adapting to Changing Customers' Needs - Continuous discovery allows companies(especially startups) to evolve their products in response to the dynamic needs of their users. By maintaining regular interactions with customers, startups can identify emerging needs and preferences, ensuring that their offerings remain relevant and valuable.

b. Enhancing Decision-Making - Frequent customer conversations provide companies with critical insights that enhance decision-making. By continuously validating assumptions and testing ideas, startups can prioritize features and improvements based on real user feedback rather than guesswork.

c. Building a Customer-Centric Culture - Customer-centric mindset encourages all the team members to prioritize user feedback in their workflows. In some scenarios, the engineering team gets carried away from the roadmap or overwhelmed with the bulk of tasks, and aligning everyone on the common goal while maintaining individual interests becomes important for long-term success. To be on track it's important to share insights on continuous discovery with other teams to generate customer empathy amongst them. We made sure that everyone listened to customer calls and that any concerns or feedback from customers were shared amongst the teams.

In an early-stage startup having the flexibility to interact directly with customers is more feasible and this advantage should be used rightly in order to move faster and in the right direction.

d. Increasing Confidence in Product Development - Regularly collecting and analyzing user feedback allows teams to validate their ideas and assumptions while reducing the risk associated with bad products being released.

e. Streamlining the Development Process - It helps in prototyping and testing ideas quickly, allowing for rapid iterations based on user responses and avoiding any costly mistakes in product development.

3. WHEN TO DO IT?

Better to practice continuous Product Discovery to be on top of the game.

4. HOW?

Focus on qualitative feedback more and conclude with a quantitative approach to validate your assumptions.

Intent vs Behavior - Actions speak more than words. Focus on what users do rather than what they tell.

Inputs for Product Discovery -

It can be taken from prospects + customers + sales + support team + customer success.

Along with gathering inputs from internal stakeholders focus should be on external partners/medium as well such as -

a. Customer , Users

b. Industry Practitioners

c. Reviews from sites like G2

5. SCALING

Being close to customers solves most of the problems and gives them the best experience.

Having a Customer Advisory Board to connect with them regularly along with syncing with the support team to root cause of any drop-off.

Scaling helps maintain continuous Product Discovery to generate better results.

Now let's look at how continuous discovery helped Revlitix reach its quarterly goal while enhancing the customer base and adoption -

Revlitix is a Revenue Analytics platform catering to the Revops team, helping them enhance their GTM practices, and gauge and optimize their sales effort to improve their ROI.

While having a couple of features catering to the sales ops persona, we figured out there is still room to explore the various sales personas and help the team to be more efficient & achieve their target revenue.

Potential existing problems observed -

a. Lack of transparency in monitoring sales representatives &team's performance.

b. Inefficiently tracking sales teams across region/continent.

c. No clear picture of which sales touchpoint to concentrate on in the pipeline to achieve their revenue target.

Opportunity observed -

a. While Revlitix was catering to the Marketing persona majorly with sufficient Marketing & Sales channels integration, solving the above problem would help the Sales & Marketing team to collaborate effectively in driving their GTM practices, lead generation & deals won.

b. The sales team being in huge numbers would help us increase our customer base.

c. Spike our 'Revenue'.

This led to the launch of a Sales Analytics module catering to Sales Managers & Leaders in monitoring and guiding their sales representatives and teams to achieve their goals and hit the desired targets.

All came through extensive user research - Primary & Secondary, POC, and intuition.

Took up the problem knowing that it caters to a larger audience in solving their most important problem - Team's Performance + Revenue Generation, leading to enhanced customer base and revenue for Revlitix.

This was on leveraging Continuous Product Discovery to scale up and build the right product to stay on top of the game.