Are You Confusing Product Discovery With Research?
Five questions to ask yourself to ensure you are practicing discovery and not just research
In too many conversations and observations, I see the word discovery used to describe what seems more like research. The first problem is the confusion in collaborating with people who have different definitions of the word. The second problem is a false sense of confidence when making decisions.
Before we move forward, let me share the definitions I use for these two terms:
- Discovery: the activities that result in deciding WHAT to create next.
- Research: investigations and study in order to draw conclusions. Finding truth.
I stumbled across the term discovery very organically. I had internalized what discovery meant to me, but I did not know the word itself. Damon Pieri and I were interviewing candidates to be our new boss. We had just launched a new platform with an amazing checklist of new features. But when it all came together, well … it didn’t really all come together. Something wasn’t right. In explaining some of our struggles, FutureNewBoss said to us: “There is a word for what you are talking about. It’s called discovery. I’ll send you some helpful resources.”
The key part of my definition of research is about finding truth and about learning new information to extend a knowledge base of what is believed to be true. However, when you are designing solutions for others, the reality is you won’t know the truth of whether the solution is right until it has been delivered to and experienced by those other people. This can become an incredibly expensive experiment. When we incorporate discovery, we build on smaller, less-expensive bits of research and experimentation to improve our chances of delivering a successful solution.
There are myriad inputs to discovery:
- Design, technical, operational feasibility (this can involve research).
- Subject matter knowledge: Inform yourself or your team with specialty knowledge about your current challenge. For example, if you are working to address cyberbullying, you will want to talk to experts in that industry.
- User research: Talking to customers. Market research. Product usage data. Knowledge about your users.
- Trends: Market, technology and cultural trends. For example, the social app TikTok is experiencing rapid growth. On the positive, there is appeal for creativity and self-expression. On the negative, it triggers privacy concerns. You could learn from both sides of this narrative.
- Business goals: Hopefully you already know these!
In this context, if you are making thoughtful decisions about what to build next, it’s easy to respond in the affirmative to the question, “Are you doing product discovery?” The dangerous part is that if you’re not practicing quality discovery, you risk choosing the wrong thing. This means wasted time, wasted money, failure to meet business goals. Or, worst of all, failure to meet the needs of your customers, which means they’ll go use the products or services of the people who DO understand their needs.
So then, what does quality discovery look like? Here’s my list of five key elements and a self-assessment question for each.
1. Cross-functional teams
Discovery is a group activity. At minimum, I recommend a triad of:
- Product or solution manager: This person is responsible for ensuring the “next thing” is the right next thing. Hey, no pressure.
- User experience designer: This person is responsible for ensuring the user can achieve what they need to achieve with minimal wasted time or energy.
- Technical expert: This person is focused on creating a functional and reliable solution.
The group members should be involved from the beginning. Knowledge transfer is an expensive and exhausting activity, and it benefits everyone to arrive at a shared understanding of the solution together. Plus, when everyone understands the problem, we can put our brain power in prime-time mode for innovation!
When you pull together a cross-functional team, you’ll see additional expected benefits and even some unexpected ones. Diversity in experiences and expertise can contribute to a more well-rounded solution. You can rely on teammates to help check your biases and assumptions.
Personally, my favorite part of working with a cross-functional team is that facing challenges with other people can be just plain fun. Successful discovery requires tapping into individual strengths and finding a role for people where they, and their ideas, can shine. As the product manager, I position myself as the facilitator of the team and our activities. And as a former teacher, finding those strengths in others is something I really enjoy.
Self-assessment: Can you name the people and their areas of focus in your discovery effort?
2. Customer interviews & insights
At its heart, understanding the needs of your users means directly interacting with them. Our team did a lot of video calls with users, because users were generally interacting with our product in their own homes. Observations and site visits are another great way to get insights. The resulting notes and collateral from talking to users can be overwhelming to organize and share. Using the How Might We (HMW) note-taking method is a great way to standardize the observation notes from your group. The group can also work together to organize the notes, which then helps identify themes and patterns.
Self-assessment: Have you talked to a customer (current or potential) in the past three weeks? Bonus points if other people on your cross-functional team participated in the conversation, as well.
3. Transparency in decision making
Unless your cross-functional team also represents your entire business, it’s likely there are others who will be interested in what you are doing, and they will want to understand the reasoning behind certain decisions. This is another reason why customer interviews are beneficial. Once you organize your HMW notes, others can quickly review and understand the insights you have gained. And because the HMW format is standardized, they can contribute and add their own insights, if necessary. A helpful strategy here is to address not only the decisions to move forward, but also considerations that were rejected. Now you’ve got the rest of the organization invested in helping inform the decisions.
Self-assessment: Where can others in the organization easily access the information that supports decisions that have been made?
4. Clear outbound communication
FEEDBACK MATTERS. We cannot expect interested parties to come check in with us any time they are curious about what’s going on. If they did, it would be exhausting and overwhelming to respond to all the inquiries. Let stakeholders know what you’re up to. In whatever format works best in your organization, have a channel for sharing important updates. Because you have transparency in how decisions were made, questions about “how” or “why” should be minimized. If your updates reveal you have missed a key piece of information that needs to be considered, you can incorporate the new information into your transparent process for all to see.
Self-assessment: Have you published or shared a proactive update within the past month of your discovery efforts?
5. Regularly testing assumptions
The most dangerous assumption of all is that the users will be satisfied with your end solution. Being wrong here means two things:
- Wasted time and money spent developing something useless
- A delay in delivering something truly valuable
There are many steps along the way to validate smaller assumptions:
- If you have a user-journey map, share with some users, and ask for their feedback. Have you accurately captured their experience?
- If you have identified the users’ greatest challenge, ask some users to list and rank THEIR challenges. Does yours make the top of the list?
- Do you have a solution in mind? Create a prototype, and share with some users, and ask for their feedback. Ask them: How might you use something like this?
Self-assessment: Have you created an end-to-end prototype experience and shared it with potential users to collect feedback?
Want to talk more about product discovery, and how you might incorporate some new tools and practices with your team? We love talking to people and sharing our ideas! Come visit us at baydapartners.com.
