Five Tips to Kick-Start Product Discovery
I’m Fred, a Product Owner at Spektrix. I’ve worked across various product opportunities, both technical and feature-based in scope. No matter how big or small the opportunity, discovery can be really overwhelming at the beginning. You’ve got lots of potential avenues to follow and undoubtedly many questions. To try and help you avoid this, I’m sharing some tips I’ve picked up along the way.
1) Work out what you already know
You’re having a hard time collecting your thoughts about what’s important to users or your business, and everything seems to be fighting for your attention at once. It’s time to focus and interrogate what you do and don’t know, and what questions are important enough to answer. Below is a method that has helped me get out of my ‘rabbit-in-the-headlights blues’:
Start by listing all the information or questions you have in a simple table with three columns: ‘I know’, ‘I assume’ & ‘I don’t know’.
I know
This column should only include facts which you know to be true right now, and are able to back up with evidence such as research findings. If anything in the ‘I know’ column has even a whiff of assumption around it, then it should be exiled to the ‘I assume’ column until you’re sure you can’t disprove your assumption. Be as rigorous and as objective as possible here.
I Assume
This column should contain, as you might expect, notions which you assume or are assumed by others involved in your discovery. Perhaps there is a theory that you’ve got based on some quick observation of your website’s analytics, or some anecdotal feedback from a colleague about poor user experience. Maybe there is some evidence to support your hunch but you have questions about what that evidence means. Pop it all here.
I Don’t Know
This column should contain everything you don’t know, where everything is up for grabs and to be discovered. At the beginning of a project, it’ll likely be your largest column.
Even with all your knowledge split out into these three columns, things can still feel a little overwhelming as you likely don’t have a clear way to show you what to focus on first. At this stage, I find it a useful exercise to assign a risk factor to each of the items in the ‘I Assume’ and ‘I Don’t Know’ columns. This risk factor is then a useful tool in helping me decide which of the items I should focus on researching further, so that I can either move them to the ‘I Know’ column, or disregard as unimportant for now.
- Chance: What is the likelihood of my assumption or knowledge being wrong?
- Impact: What happens if my assumption or knowledge is wrong?
You can assign a point system from 1–5 (1 being lowest chance or impact, 5 being highest chance or impact) to each item and then your risk factor is simply a calculation of both:
Risk Factor = Chance x Impact
Here’s a great example of how Trello and other ‘kanban’ style tool can be used to help you perform this exercise. Let’s imagine that we are starting an ice-cream cafe in a trendy part of London, and we want to ensure that we pitch a menu to appeal to our target market. We’ve done some research so far, but there’s lots more to be done. Early on in the project, one of our investors said that we should exclusively sell ice-cream in cones as most people love ice-cream in cones more than they like pots. We’re not so sure that this assumption is true so we put it into our ‘I assume’ column. In working out the risk factor, we assign these two values:
Chance: 4/5 - We’ve not done any extensive research into ice-cream container preference.
Impact: 5/5 - Cones are highly perishable (more so than sprinkles, for example) and therefore if we overstock without selling them we risk losing lots of money, and also risk putting off customers from purchasing our products if they can’t get the container they like.
In this case, Risk Factor = 5x4 = 20, which is very high, so we decide to test this assumption as quickly as possible.
2) Move Smarter, not Faster.
Discovery is all about getting answers as quickly as possible and working out what will help you move towards your discovery goal as soon as you can. Add to that the inevitable pressure you’ll be getting to deliver, it makes good sense to make the most out of your time at every opportunity. Be careful not to rush and compromise the quality of your work, but instead think about how you can maximise the value of your research in answering the most important questions you have.
When it comes to research and speed, Erika Hall puts it best in Just Enough Research:
Focus only on the essential user types
Deal with your data as soon as you get it
Involve your team in the analysis
Do the less important stuff later
In other words, prioritise what is most important now (you can use your handy table you created above to help!) and test assumptions or theories using the data you get, as soon as you get it. Involve your team so that you’re sure to keep clear from your own bias when analysing, and kick less-pressing priorities down the road until they’re more important.
3) Be resourceful.
In a similar theme, you’ll never have the perfect set-up with the perfect conditions, or just enough time to get the most perfect set of data from the perfect participants. Life, business, and train delays all get in the way. Whilst you should absolutely treat your research scientifically and hold yourself (and others) accountable to do so, you’ll have to accept now that things won’t be perfect. Sorry!
So what can you do to be resourceful? Well, during a recent UX Crunch meetup, Sam O’Brien (User Experience Manager at RingCentral) floated the idea to apply weights to data collected from certain user types.
For example, imagine that to test our assumptions about cones vs pots for ice-cream, we’re taking on some market research. We are hoping to speak to our target markets, which we’ve split into Primary; Secondary and Tertiary. Primary is our most important market, Secondary our second-most, and Tertiary our third-most important.
Our Primary market is ‘Experiential Professionals’. They’re people who like to try new things, live or work in the area close to our ice-cream parlour, and have disposable income to spend on boutique ice-cream. They’re most important to us as they are most likely to be our loyal customers and will spread word-of-mouth about our business.
Our Secondary market is ‘Weekend City-Breakers’. They’re people who are on short holidays in London and want to check out the local areas to eat. They’re second-most important to us as they will help us diversify income streams, but are unlikely to return.
Our Tertiary market is ‘Social Media Super-Users’. They’re people who are on the look-out for great content to share on their social media platforms, and therefore are likely to take pictures of our interesting flavour combos and share them online. They’re third-most important to us as they could potentially draw attention to our business online, but they are also unlikely to return.
Now that we’ve defined our markets and their importance to us, we can add a multiplier to data you collect against that user type to give that data additional weight in our research.
For our ice-cream parlour we have a list like this::
In this example the markets ‘Experiential Professionals’ and ‘Weekend City Breakers’ are our most weighted, followed by ‘Social Media Super Users’. We also include ‘Everyone Else’ with no weighting at all as, whilst we do want to take all opinions into account, we are trying to run a business and need to be realistic about who we aim our product at.
With this weighting in place, we can now begin to test our assumptions around cones vs pots safe in the knowledge that we can remain scientific with your approach and pay attention to our primary market most, whilst accepting that they may not end up dominating our research pool.
4) Trust your gut… where appropriate
It’s difficult not to feel like an imposter — especially when all your time is spent speaking to and learning about specialists. This is especially true in a B2B environment, where you’ll be dealing with users who know their own domain and therefore its needs well.
For example, imagine instead that our ice-cream parlour was a wholesale supplier instead. Our research would, in this instance, involve learning as much as possible about the businesses (parlours, restaurants, vans) we supply, so that we can be sure we’re providing a service that most suits their needs (and challenge those needs when it feels appropriate!)
As your research progresses, you’ll gain a nuanced understanding of the opportunity you’re discovering and of the user needs that you’re serving. Use this understanding and knowledge you have gained alongside your gut feeling to determine where to head next or what assumptions to disregard.
Beware though — it’s easy to conflate intuition with bias. Always try to ratify your proposed actions with users to ensure you’re on the right track.
5) Document everything
It goes without saying that you should keep a record of everything you do, find out, and track the decisions you make. Most importantly, you are not doing research for yourself. The expertise and knowledge you’re gaining during discovery are not only yours: they’re a business asset! Your documentation should be detailed enough so that someone else in your business could make decisions about how to proceed with an opportunity without your presence.
You should also aim to abstract your research documentation not only from you but also from any single opportunity. Where you are able to, ensure that your documentation has longevity. For example, with our ice-cream parlour market research, the information that we find out will be just as useful in guiding other opportunities further down the line as it was in aiding our discovery regarding cones vs pots. So, document in a way that allows this to happen. As a bonus point, having a clear log of the journey you’ve taken is also important for helping to tell a story about the opportunity, a key part of product management.
In summary, when starting out on your discovery journey remember to…
- assess what you know,
- analyse data and make decisions quickly,
- avoid perfectionism but keep it scientific,
- trust your intuition
- …and write everything down!
Thanks for reading, let me know what you think and if you’ve got any more to add in the comments!
