How to create a Product discovery process in Notion without complications
As a Product Manager, starting the Discovery process from scratch can be an overwhelming task. However, with the right tools and methodologies, assumptions and hypotheses for your product can be effectively generated. Here is a step-by-step guide on how to achieve it.
TL;DR
This article provides a guided process for generating assumptions and hypotheses to effectively validate your product ideas. Using tools such as User Personas, Customer Journey maps, and Business Model canvas, you can identify key assumptions and prioritize them based on importance and confidence.
This iterative process will help you create a better product that meets the needs of your customers and the objectives of your business.
If you’re interested in simplifying this process, try this Notion template for just $25. It is a comprehensive tool that will guide you through every step of the process and help you keep track of your assumptions and hypotheses.
What is this about?
Before delving into the details of the process, it’s important to understand what we’re trying to achieve. The ultimate goal of this process is to generate a set of hypotheses that will help you test and validate your product ideas.
Through this process, you’ll also generate other tools that will be very useful to you in your day to day work as a Product Manager if you don’t already have them.
Step 1: Establish our target audience
Assuming you haven’t done your homework yet, the first step in this discovery process is to establish who our target audience is. Understanding who your customers are, their behaviors, and pain points is essential to creating a successful product.
To achieve this, we must create a User Persona that represents your target audience. A User Persona is a fictional character that represents your ideal customer. It includes demographic information, needs, and desires.
In our Notion template, you can edit the User Persona photo, give it a name, age, profession, gender, and use the tables below to identify user needs and pains.
If you have Notion AI, you can use the final block to generate a slightly more detailed description based on the information you’ve already included.
Step 2: Generate assumptions
After establishing your target audience, the next step is to generate assumptions.
Assumptions are beliefs we hold about our product or user behavior. These beliefs can be about anything from user needs to the viability of a business model. It’s important to identify these assumptions and test them to validate them and ensure we’re making informed decisions in product design.
In general, we can divide them into 3 main blocks
- Desirability: Will users want our solution?
- Feasibility: Can we develop it?
- Viability: Is there a scalable business model behind it?
To extract assumptions, we must ask ourselves at each step of the processes we will see below, “What does our idea need to be successful?”
First of all, we will go to the Customer journey map section and fill in the table with each of the steps that we expect your users to follow from the basic problem to the moment after purchase.
Then, try to answer in each step the question of “What does our idea need to be successful?” focusing on each of the major blocks above. Write down all your Customer journey map assumptions in the table below.
Once you have finished writing down all the assumptions of that step, we repeat the process with the Business canvas section.
When we have finished filling in the assumptions of the Customer journey and the Business model canvas, you will have a list of all the assumptions grouped by type. This will be our starting point to begin validating ideas.
Step 3: Evaluate and prioritize assumptions
Now that we have our list, the next phase is to fill in the table we have in step 3 of our Notion table. To do this, we will score each of the assumptions in the following dimensions:
- Importance refers to how critical an assumption is to ensuring the functioning of our idea. From 1 to 5 is low importance, and from 6 to 10 is high importance.
- Confidence is the amount of evidence we have to support our assumption. Like in the previous point, from 1 to 5 it will be low confidence, and from 6 to 10 it will be high confidence.
While doing this, you will see that the “Start with these” tab begins to fill up. These will be the important assumptions with a low level of evidence, so they represent a higher risk for our idea, so we need to work on them first.
The other tabs will also be filled in and sorted according to their importance. After validating the first ones, we can start with the “second batch” prioritizing by their importance or by the level of evidence.
The third batch has lower priority due to its low importance and high risk. You can choose to de-risk or drop these assumptions.
Step 4: Create hypotheses
Once we’ve identified the assumptions we want to address, the next step is to create hypotheses that either validate or dismiss our point of view. We can use the information from these assumptions to create solutions that address the needs and pains of our users.
To build a hypothesis, we can use the following template “We believe that [building the feature/solution] for [users], addresses their [user outcome] and helps us achieve [business outcome]”. Alternatively, we can use the Notion AI section that will fill in the [spaces] using the data we provide.
Final thoughts
Starting the discovery process from scratch can be overwhelming, but by following these steps, you can effectively generate assumptions and hypotheses for your product.
It’s important to remember that assumptions are just that, assumptions, and must be tested and validated. The discovery process is iterative, and we may need to go back to the beginning and refine our assumptions and hypotheses. By doing so, we’ll create a better product that meets the needs of customers and users, as well as the objectives of our business.
If you’ve made it this far, I recommend purchasing the Notion template that accompanies this entry. It will make the entire process much easier for you and your team while supporting my work to continue creating templates like this. In a future entry, we’ll explore how to create an experiment backlog and validate (or not) our hypotheses.
Thank you very much for reading, I would appreciate your claps and sharing this entry with anyone you think might be interested.
