What is product discovery and what tools can I use to test the ideas that emerge? Part I

Preamble:

What’s in this Article (Part I):

This is a two-part series that discusses the discovery process aswell as the tools that can help you get valuable insights cheap and quickly.

• I share my backstory and what led me to talk discovery
• I talk about what discovery allows us to do
• I talk about the benefits of a continuous cycle
• I touch on continuous discovery

I’ll share the tools to use in Part II.

Introduction

As I look through my rearview mirror and reflect on the way we made decisions during my career in banking versus how I make them now it’s easy to see what was missing. I remember reading Requirements Documents and having to dig through subjective terms like “easy” to really clarify the meaning — what’s easy to one person isn’t easy to another! I enjoyed clarifying ideas— I didn’t know it at the time but this was the discovery process and involved me being skilled at working with cross-functional stakeholders together to get a shared understanding to ensure we were solving the right problems for the business leveraging IT.

Now back to 2017, I am going to share some real conversations I had this week that compelled me to write this article.

Note: The names have of course been modified for privacy and I am being particularly vague as I have not been asked to share the specifics of the problem they are seeking to address

The first is Johnson:

“ I came across this idea after my own personal experience looking for this product which took longer than expected. It became clear that this product wasn’t being catered to people from my background. I ran a focus group and and we discussed this problem which others had experienced. I am now in talks with engineers on how to build this thing”

We also have, Tobi:

“After 10+ years experience in my field, I have come to understand the common problems that people are having and I know we can build an online solution that will give them all the answers. Do you know any reliable digital platform developers you can recommend”

Both Jonathan and Tobi shared their ideas with me because they wanted to discover whether their idea is viable one; of course it doesn’t really matter what I said — as economists will remind you it’s all about supply and demand — the market wins every time, but “How do we avoid flops long before we finish building the whole thing?”

Even with the one-off research exercise Johnson conducted both were falling into the “Build Trap”

“Build it and they will come”

Sorry mate, that’s just not how great products are built.

90% of startups fail — that’s a humbling metric and it serves as a reminder of why we need to move learning earlier in the process. By co-creating with users we can answer questions like:

1. Are we meeting customer needs?
2. Do customers want our solution?
3. Is it intuitive how to use it?
4. Are we solving important problems that customers care about (not the same as #2)?
5. And we driving towards a desired outcome?

These are all important questions but probably most important is the last one — it gives us the focus we need towards the goals we want to achieve and in the spirit of being lean helps us to avoid wasteful activities with no clear purpose.

I asked both Johnson and Tobi to list out all the things (assumptions) that need to be true for their idea to be a successful product. Pick one of their riskiest assumptions, an important one (this is more a function of your business goals and the value you deliver to customers) and validate it.

So what is validation in this context?
Good product development is a science (involving experimentation) and art (getting having a combination of enough quantitative and qualitative actionable insights to have a “gut feeling” sometimes).

I suppose many of you will have read Eric Reiss’ “The Lean Startup” which was informed by the work of Steve Blank, and has given many of us the Build-Measure-Learn (BML) framework to help us learn earlier in the process.

The goal of the BML is to help us evaluate whether an initiative is worth pursuing. The end result could be to kill it off, jump to the next idea or invest in it further.

If we’ve learnt anything from the agile mindset it is that we should focus on delivering iterative, incremental value to users.

Discovery time

The best way to think of customer about discovery is in relation to delivery. Our goal with delivery is to ship value as fast as possible — some companies are shipping improvements to their products 30–50 times a day. And our goal with discovery is to learn as fast as possible using these actionable insights to inform what to do next.

Initiatives emerge from getting a deep understanding of the customer and we can go back to iteratively validating as mentioned earlier.

Our ability to serve users better than anyone else in the market is what will make us win, this is why we need to gain perspective of users problems and a deep understanding of their needs

REMEMBER: There will always be more ideas than we have time for. By time-boxing these exercises, we are able to make tradeoff decisions which help us steer the ship in the right direction.

Here are some examples of things that we can learn during discovery

• Verify your market
• Locate your customers (the appropriate channels to reach them)
• Test your value proposition
• Know your pricing
• Check your sales process
• and many more!

So what does continuous discovery look like?
Smaller research activities every week by the team building the product in pursuit of a desired outcome.

Why?

How many times have you found conflicting studies? What continuous discovery allows us to do is look at the whole set of studies or results and ask ourselves. “Based on the whole set or research, what’s the best decision we can make”

We don’t want to make a decision on 1 A/B test or 1 interview. We want to make decision based on sets of research.

Smaller experiments
We don’t need to be thinking of experiments as large-scale pilots. We can design smaller experiments that allow us to learn fast. What can we learn this week? Infact, what can we learn today? Test your riskiest assumptions first.

In the early stages our focus should be on learning fast and the cost-effective tools we can use to help inform decisions.

In the next post, I will be sharing some tools that we can use to do this.

Tools are…just that, tools. The main thing is to ask what is this allowing me to learn quicker? What does it help me learn faster?

Part II Sneak Peek:

Part II reveals some tools that I’ve gathered to help you get going. This isn’t an exhaustive list and each has their pros and cons but hopefully this will help you to understand why there isn’t really an excuse for not doing customer discovery.

Continue to Part II.

Thanks for hitting the 💚 if this article helped you understand how to use user insights to inform you decisions before delivery.