Helpful questions for better product discovery
How to separate good ideas from the bad ones? 👩🔬🕵️♂️👩💻
The goal is to learn not to prove that the product works — Marty Caga “Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love“
👆Great book. Highly recommended.
Here’s a simple framework to help product discovery, provide better solutions, and walk the shortest path to product market fit:
Q1. Would the user choose to use or buy this?
The answer defines how valuable it is to the user the product you’re making.
Q2. Can the user figure out how to use this?
The answer is not as simple as yes or no. Often, the fit depends on the mental model of the target group, not testing group. Make sure you are not basing the answer on bias tests. Best is to run usability tests in production by introducing features in “Beta” mode.
Q3. Can we build this?
Probably the least straight forward answer involves asking more questions and early engagement from the engineering team:
- Do we know how to build this?
- Do we have skills on the team to build this?
- Do we have enough time to build this?
- Do we need to make any architectural changes to our current tech stack to build this?
- Do we have all the components to build this?
- Do we understand what are the dev dependencies to build this?
- Will the performance be acceptable?
- Will it scale and do we know what infrastructure we need to support it?
- How secure does it have to be?
Q4. Is this a viable solution for our business?
Ray Dalio, an American billionaire investor, hedge fund manager, and philanthropist, in his book “Principles: Life and Work” brings an important business principle:
Combine unrelated revenue streams to balance the risks and stay on the upside while reducing the downsides.
