Beyond Utility: Re-Discovering Product Discovery

The time is right for we designers to look at Discovery, that squishy, early part of the design process. Discovery isn’t new. Even in earliest days of my career in the mid-90s working for a large Internet agency, we still called that kind of work Discovery. We’ve been chewing on it ever since.

Back in 2012, for example, Rian Van Der Merwe wrote “Usable yet Useless,” an excellent guide for doing Product Discovery which summarized the value:

If we want to design better, more useful products, we need to stop designing solutions too early and start instead with product discovery: a process that helps us understand the problem properly so we don’t just design things better, but design better things.

Conceiving of design as “solving problems” helps us separate understanding the problem from creating a solution. This dichotomy implies that we need to have well-defined inputs and constraints and needs before we can hope to imagine the product. Solving the problem — that is, conceiving of a product design — entails applying frameworks, paradigms, and methods to those inputs to get to an output, a product that addresses those constraints and needs. I picture it like this: