Product Discovery ≠ Ideation
It might sound less fun, but Ideation is not the same as Discovery
I’ve been asking friends and colleagues in the product and design field how they approach Product Discovery. After asking a few times, I realised that for many, discovery evokes creative, coffee infused sessions with post-it lined walls and whiteboard drawings, totally incomprehensible to the next group of people that pass through your meeting room.
It was clear : product discovery was synonymous with ideation.
Of course ideation is a part of discovery, but I would not even consider it to be the primary activity during discovery.
So then, if ideation is not discovery — and I’m taking away your post-its and markers (for now), we can ask the question “what is product discovery”?
I see it as an approach to risk mitigation in 4 interrelated parts, each part having relationships and potential impacts on the other parts. This explains why product discovery is a non-linear process: what you learn in one part of discovery can make you return to another part to re-think it. That is part of an ongoing discovery dialogue that makes for good discovery, good products, and good business.
Part one is Business strategy
Stakeholder alignment on a business strategy and desired product outcomes is the fundamental starting point for discovery. This usually means having an alignment workshop with product stakeholders before engaging the rest of the product teams. It is surprisingly rare to find stakeholders that are aligned at a strategic level.
The time invested in aligning and communicating your business strategy pays for itself many times over, because equipping your product teams with a clear vision and target outcomes is what empowers them to make the decisions that deliver results for your business (article about that coming soon).
Part two is Customer Understanding
Product discovery requires an in-depth understanding of your customers. That understanding comes from frequent, in-depth user research (qualitative research). I refer to “in-depth” research because building a great product, requires that you go beyond understanding your customers’ problems. You need to have a deep understanding of their motivations, behaviours, and how your product fits into their lives.
Luckily, there are many resources available to help you learn how to move beyond surface research and gain deep insights into your customers’ perspective. Armed with customer insights, your product team can start to choose which ones to address in your product. Keep in mind that the ones you choose should be those that align with your product and business objectives defined at the beginning (article about that coming soon).
Part three is Solutions
Here is your favourite part. Product discovery requires solutions and ideation is a powerful approach to generating potential solutions (yes, you can have your markers and post-its back).
This is the moment where having product team members (with varied backgrounds and perspectives) participating in ideation sessions can generate multiple solutions capable of achieving business and customer goals. As you generate solutions, you’ll see the value of using a visual mapping tool to align your solutions with the work you’ve done in the previous parts.
At this point, you’ll want to stay open to multiple solutions. Narrowing your focus to a single solution would bias testing and counter the risk mitigation effect of product discovery (article about that coming soon).
Part four is Testing
With multiple potential solutions, we need to prove which ones will actually deliver value to our customers and our business. The goal during testing is to test your high potential solutions with the smallest possible investment.
I have good news, you don’t need an MVP to test a solution. There are many tools and strategies available to test without having to code or invest extensively in a potential solution.
One of my favourite testing approaches is assumption testing, as detailed by Teressa Torres in her book “Continuous Discovery Habits”. This approach lets you test multiple solutions in parallel by testing their shared assumptions.
Another favourite testing resource is David Bland and Alex Osterwalder book “Testing Business Ideas” that provides a detailed inventory of testing tools and information to help you understand when and how to use them.
Testing, like user research, brings more answers and insights that will ultimately help determine into which solutions your “delivery” efforts and investments should be concentrated.
The missing part
While writing in an effort to counter the idea that Product Discovery is akin to ideation, I have shared a simplified overview of the 4 parts I consider to be key to Product Discovery.
But in no way is Product Discovery a one-size fits all, mechanical 1–2–3–4 approach. It is much more than a static series of parts: it is non-linear, it moves, it evolves, and it needs to be revised regularly. Discovery needs to be tailored to the organisation that relies on it.
Product Discovery is first and foremost a human activity. It makes product teams learn about the people they are building for. In return, Discovery aligns and empowers your product teams (and that is fundamentally a human endeavour).
For the sake of this article, I put forward the primary output of Product Discovery as being risk mitigation. But my deep conviction is that the core outputs of good Product Discovery are confidence and alignment.
Confidence in knowing that what you have decided to build has a high probability of generating the results your business and customers need; alignment between the teams who have contributed to the Discovery process and own the results they are trying to generate.
That’s much more than an ideation workshop will ever bring.
