7 Product Discovery Types and Its Biases
Product discovery is a critical stage in Product management as that becomes a guiding star for your upcoming efforts. However often we ignore the importance of it and look for a quick solution so that we can answer “whats building” and “what to build next?”
As humans its our inherent nature to have certain biases in our thought process as well as interpretation to any observation and Product managers are no machines to escape it. A great Product manager however tries to minimize these biases and the discovery process that follows these biases.There is no right or wrong approach in Product management, each decision has its own opportunity cost.Recently I came across a video by Leslie Grandy that resonated with my thought and inspired to publish my learning.
Following are 7 common Product Discovery Types and the biases involved in it
Confirmation Discovery: In this type of Product discovery, its inward-out where any executive or the most influential voice pushes the idea of the product for confirmation i.e. Validate my idea through customer, Example: when you go to customer with an imaginative idea and ask the customer if their expectation resonates with yours?
Product-as-Prototype Discovery: Here you scale Confirmation Discovery to a working prototype and reach out to customer anticipating success of this prototype. The challenge here is what if the prototype is not required by the customer? Its good that you failed faster but could this approach would have been improved if your prototype gets derived from a validated need?
One man Discovery: Product discovery is only PM’s responsibilities, not anyone elsse’s! sounds familiar? Well here the team takes a back-seat and delegates the discovery completely to the product managers. “Its not my job” or “my job is to follow the requirements”..falls under this category. Great products are always a blended amalgamation of inward and outward approach. Performance of team players always outcasts one-man show.
Fragmented Discovery: When the implication of the discovery is not assessed with entire user journey. When what you have discovered is partial step in user journey instead of its entirety. Its like solving a bottleneck in traffic to observe that all you have done is shifting of bottleneck from your product to another product. A great example could be delivery of merchandise from online shopping stores, many of them just focused on one way delivery but not on return mechanism or logistics.
Big-bang Discovery: When you believe to launch a one big ship or space shuttle and find it difficult to validate prioritized needs in limited isolation. There are products which has this but there is a huge risk also involved in it. A great example is Windows Vista. Try to figure out is your product really mission critical all-in-one shot and there is no way chunks can be validated?
Outsourced Discovery: If Product discovery stage is outsourced to an external vendor either because of lack of competencies or resources or high on budget as well. Every entity has an agenda of survival and looks for a sustainable dependency as well.
Continuous Discovery: Users, Customers, market every entity is evolving continually and so as your product has to. Thus there is also a need of continuous discovery of the evolving problems and needs of your customers.However this is applicable only when you can break your user problem roadmap to stepping stones. The discovery is highly dependent on which stage of your product is in PLC and the resources available with you to meet. As a PM, you have to be ruthless at prioritization and your discovery can not be one of the event, therefore iterative discovery and continual input to prioritization will minimize the biases inherent which optimizes the probability of your product’s success.
