My Product Discovery Framework In 3 Steps
The emphasis is on validation
Have you ever built software products that ended up with little to no users?
When I started out learning to build web apps, I made a common mistake that perhaps most beginners share. I was not clear about the problems or pain points I wanted to solve. Nor the impact or implications that the problems caused. I was overly focused on the solutions; on the ideas.
The good news is, it didn’t matter that much as they were random side projects or rapid prototypes to bring my entrepreneurial ideas to life. However, if you are serious about building something that has an impact to the wider community, then that could be a problem.
In fact, too many startups build products that nobody wants. On one hand, they assume that users have certain problems or pain points. On the other hand, they engineered solutions that look for a problem. I call this the lack of product-market fit. There is no market need for the product.
The result? Waste of million of dollars.
What if we invested more time in researching and validating ideas upfront before diving straight into product delivery? This is the goal of the article — to elaborate about product discovery and the steps to do it. Product discovery, in essence, is a decision-making process by deeply understanding real user problems and then finding the optimal way to address them.
In this article, I am going to outline a series of simple steps we can take to conduct product discovery.
Overview of steps
- Complete the value proposition canvas
- Build the simplest possible version of MVP
- Test the MVP with real users
Let’s discuss each step in detail.
Complete the value proposition canvas
Assuming that you have some sort of idea of what kind of problem you want to solve, now it is the time to put pen to paper your thoughts with concrete details.
Value proposition canvas is a tool that allows you to design, test and visualize the value of your product for customers in a structured way.
The canvas is divided into two sections — customer profile and value map.
In the customer profile section, you describe the jobs that customers want to get done. It can be functional, social or emotional. Pains are negative outcomes that customers hope to avoid. Gains are positive outcomes that customers hope to achieve.
In the value map section, you list the product and services your value proposition builds on. You describe in which way these products are pain relievers or alleviate pains that customers care about, making their lives better. You also outline in what ways they are gain creators, how they increase outcomes and benefits for your customers.
You’ll achieve fit by creating a clear connection between what matters to customers and how your products or services ease pain and create gains.
Be as explicit as possible!
Let’s do an example. Suppose we are interested in building a dating app. We will focus on one customer segment — college students.
The customer jobs in this case could be finding a date, or chatting with someone new. The pains of college students could be that it is challenging to find potential dates if they belonged to faculties that have a skewed gender ratio. Moreover, if one is less involved in extra-curricular activities, it is difficult to find opportunities to interact with students from other faculties. The gains could be to find like-minded people who are interested in finding a date or a partner.
In this case, a product or service could be a dating app that we can build. The pain relievers are the availability of students aggregated from various faculties. The gain creators could be to view students’ profile and filter the ones that best matches one’s personality and interest, before initiating a conversation.
Watch this video for another example on value proposition canvas based on Uber.
Build the simplest possible version of MVP
Unless you have concrete data to support the details you wrote on the value proposition canvas, I would safely claim that most of them are nothing but assumptions. Now, we want to build a minimum viable product (MVP) that attempts to validate these assumptions.
Eric Ries — the author of The Lean Startup — defines MVP as the version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.
This leads to the key premise behind the idea of a MVP: an actual product which may be no more than a landing page, or a service with an appearance of automation, but which is fully manual behind the scenes.
Simply, we want to build the smallest, lowest-investment solutions available to reduce risk — a simulated version of the product is the answer.
Let’s go back to the example of the dating app. Instead of building a fully-functional mobile app that helps matches college students automatically, you can build a landing page that publicizes this feature. Add in an interest form that they can sign up for. Matching can be done manually by your team and users can be notified via email within 3 working days.
Building an automated app right now doesn’t matter as much. What matters is testing the need or desire for it.
Not to forget that you should omit unnecessary features at this stage. Minimally, you should have features that are needed to solve the problem. Back to the example of the dating app, perhaps an in-app chat feature can be ignored. An easier and temporary solution is to direct the users to their social media accounts like Instagram where private messaging is already available for use.
Cut the effort wherever necessary to focus on building the most essential of features.
Test the MVP with real users
At this step, your MVP should be ready for launch. Enabling your potential users or customers to use your product or service and observe their behavior is the best way to gain real feedback.
Usually, established applications have built-in features that track user actions and data. However, as a new product or startup, you might not have the capacity to incorporate these in. So, your best bet is to gain feedback via surveys or interviews.
Let’s go back to the dating app example again. Publicize the new service launch within your college community via social media channels like Instagram, Telegram or LinkedIn. I believe there are other more vibrant and active student groups that you can blast it out to. If you have some spare cash, perhaps you can do a giveaway coupled with a referral program to attract additional users. Whatever is it, bring the product to your user and start getting the interested ones to use it.
Reach out to the users who signed up from your landing page. If you can afford it, provide some incentive for them to participate in an interview with you. Or, send mass emails for them to do a survey.
Repeats the steps
Most software or digital products are never considered done. There are always opportunities to iterate and improve based on user feedback, behavior and other kinds of data available for use. Therefore, keep in mind that product discovery is a continuous process, not just at the beginning!
Once you garnered sufficient feedback from your early users, it’s time to improve upon the product!
Finally, once you feel that the research phase is done sufficiently, go ahead with product delivery. Go forth to build and execute!
Conclusion
The key takeaway here is that we are prioritizing learning users’ needs over shipping product features. Look at this as an experiment investigating the customer-centered definition of value, rather than following a predetermined plan of action based on possibly unvalidated assumptions. We want to get some signal that we are heading in the right direction, as opposed to blindly engineering 100 features that serve little value, bringing us to nowhere.
The next time you wish to build new product, ask yourself what problem you are solving and if your new idea is what users actually want or need. If doubtful, I recommend doing product discovery to help you get started and perhaps steer you on the right path.
Some may suggest that I have oversimplified the product discovery process in just a matter of 3 steps, but they are the imperative ones for me. If you have tried my product discovery framework, let me know your thoughts below!
