The Importance of Product Discovery in Building Successful Products
Have you ever built a product that received negative feedback or didn’t quite meet the needs of your customers? This is often due to a lack of proper product discovery. In this article, we’ll explore what product discovery is, its importance, and how it can help you build successful products.
What is Product Discovery?
Product discovery is a customer-centric process that helps product teams understand their users’ needs and build products that add value. It’s the decision-making process that determines what to build and how to define the solution’s scope. Product discovery involves various tools and techniques that enable companies to validate their product assumptions accurately.
The Product Discovery Process
The product discovery process encompasses a variety of techniques designed to help you understand your customers’ needs and decide what to implement. These activities include:
- Customer development
- Assumption tests
- Customer visits
- Customer journey mapping
- Design thinking
- Impact mapping
- Usability tests
- A/B tests
- Customer interviews and focus groups
- Demand tests
- Story mapping
- Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD)
- Experience mapping
- Opportunity solution tree (OST)
Why is Product Discovery Important?
Product discovery is essential for building successful products. It helps product teams find data and information that allows them to work on solving problems and building features that really matter to their users. Product discovery enables you to:
- Find product-market fit
- Avoid building what’s not needed
- Validate stakeholder assumptions
The Perils of Skipping Product Discovery
Skipping product discovery can lead to building products that don’t meet the needs of your customers. This can result in:
- Usability risk – The product/feature is hard to use and unintuitive
- Viability risk – The product/feature won’t return its expected ROI
- Value risk – The product/feature adds no value to the user
- Feasibility risk – The development/scrum team won’t be able to deliver the product/feature
Getting Started with Product Discovery
Product discovery doesn’t have a universal process. However, there are templates available to help you get started. Two recommended templates are:
- Product Discovery Ideation Session template
- Product Discovery Workbook
These templates will help you ideate solutions, groom ideas, and prepare them for validation.
Conclusion
Product discovery is crucial for building successful products. It helps product teams understand their users’ needs and build products that add value. By incorporating product discovery into your product development process, you’ll be able to avoid common pitfalls and build products that meet the needs of your customers.