Product Discovery
Product discovery is the process of thoroughly understanding user problems and needs and then testing solution ideas before development begins. By creating a close relationship with your users and letting them guide your design thinking, your overall product strategy is much more likely to solve real user problems.
Time Saving
Product discovery allows you to see if a product needs to exist before you spend a lot of money building, refining, and marketing it.
Risk Reduction
Changing settings late in the development process - or worse, releasing a feature that no one uses - just isn't fun.
Consciously Planned
By including customers' perspectives, discovery inspires the team to question their assumptions and think outside the box when making decisions.
More Innovation
This not only leads to more innovative solutions – but also checks which of your ideas represent market opportunities.
Why do we need product discovery?
Product discovery is a key step in product design because it provides deep insight into user problems and preferences, which in turn influences the proposed solution and its success.
Learn the Basic Steps of Product Discovery
All the main stages of product discovery are based on knowing your users: understanding what problems they have, how they would like to see them solved, and assessing how your product achieves that goal.
Learning and understanding
During this exploration phase, approach users with maximum curiosity to identify their real problem, rather than looking for ways to validate a previously formulated idea. Conduct research using customer interviews, competitive analysis and product analysis.
Definition and decisiveness
Refine reviews and identify the most recurring issues collected in user stories. Determine what problems you will try to solve with your product, then conduct an experiment with five "why" questions and turn it into a well-defined hypothesis.
Setting priorities
Your first attempt at solving the problem. Gather your team to brainstorm and refine potential solutions. Use prioritization techniques to choose what to work on first. Then talk to your users - ask what the product should look like, how much it should cost and whether people actually want it.
Testing and prototyping
Build your product and get customer feedback. This means developing a wireframe, prototype, or minimum viable product (MVP) that can be shared with potential users for real insights. At this point, conduct usability testing and then return to iterate based on the results.
