What is product discovery?
Product discovery is when a company studies its customers to find out what they need by looking at their problems. Then, the company comes up with a product or line of products that solves those problems and meets those needs.
Finding new products is an essential part of the planning process. If businesses can’t prove or disprove what they think about their customers, they might waste time, money, and resources making goods people don’t want.
Synonyms
- product development
- product discovery process
The Value of Finding New Products
The process of finding new products is helpful for everyone.
- The business: By finding promising products, the business doesn’t waste time and money making things that no one wants.
- The customer: Good product discovery means giving customers a product they want and need, which may become very important to them.
- The product team: The product discovery process helps ensure that product teams set priorities correctly and build a successful product. This boosts morale within the team because they know the product will meet the needs of their buyers.
The Process of Finding New Products: A Quick Look
Businesses need to focus on two main areas if they want to do product finding well: exploration and validation.
A lot of in-depth study goes into the exploration phase, which is also the first step in the product discovery process. To do this, you need to talk to all the people involved, including salespeople and customers, and figure out the problems customers may have and how to solve them. Making a solid business case for a product involves a lot of studies, coming up with ideas, and judging them.
Validation: The second step in the product discovery process is validation. This is where all the studies and ideas from the first step are checked to ensure they are correct. Every guess that a business made during the research stage is now either proven or disproved. A product must be tested before it is created and built to ensure it can help people. Prototypes are made and tested using customer data and customer comments to do this.
Mistakes People Make
For businesses and their product teams to have a good product discovery process, they need to know about the mistakes that businesses often make so they can avoid them.
Read on if a company or product team wants to avoid these mistakes.
#1: Giving up
It’s hard to find new products. It can take weeks, months, or even years for a team to do the study needed to find a gap in the market and a possible solution that could fill it. Giving up when things get hard or finding something in the way of other work is one of the worst things a product team can do.
Product teams need to talk to their customers daily to find out what they are missing and if they are missing anything. This keeps discovery in mind. From this point of view, regular contact helps ensure that discovery doesn’t get dropped because teams are too busy or have other things that need to be done.
#2: Having too many people join
It takes a long time to choose, especially in the B2B space. If a company includes too many people in the product discovery part, the buyer journey often lasts even longer. But businesses must also ensure that enough people are involved to ensure that the process of finding new products is fair and well-rounded.
At the very least, the designer, engineer, and product manager should be there from the start. After that, marketers and product researchers can be brought in as needed and brought up to speed so that the whole process doesn’t take too long.
#3: Not making finding and delivery work together
The product team’s job is to develop new goods and solutions to meet market needs and ease customer complaints, but that’s only half of what they do. Those goods must be sent to customers and marketed to them to make sales. The product delivery team can’t know precisely what the product discovery team was trying to do if they weren’t in the room when the product was found and the same people aren’t working on both sides.
Each product team should be in charge of finding and delivering new features. By bringing these two parts together, the people who came up with the original idea can also create the product.
#4: Not being found
This is the first step in finding a new product, but not the only step. When a company is exploring, it might not check the claims it makes. They might end up with a product that doesn’t solve any problems, doesn’t sell, doesn’t fill a gap in the market, or is the same as something else on the market that is better or cheaper.
To avoid this, businesses should remember that even if they think their product is revolutionary, others might disagree. Companies will never know if a product suits their customers if they don’t make a proper discovery. That’s why validating the product’s answer is so important.
#5: Challenges that aren’t clear
Product teams need to think about all the data, feedback, and research they gather during the exploration and validation stages for product discovery to work. Companies can usually skip to the validation step once a problem or problems are found. This is a mistake. This is where product teams need to dig deeper to ensure they’ve found the real cause of the problem.
Product teams can avoid unclear problems by clarifying who the target user is, their current issue and how to solve it, the company’s suggested solution, the success criteria, and the business value.
Methods for Finding New Products
Product finding can be done in several different ways by businesses.
Methods for Finding New Products
Phase of Exploration
As part of the exploration phase, product teams should talk to customers, study competitors in detail, and look at product data to learn more about their customers and their problems.
Phase of validation
The next step is to look at the information gathered during the initial study and choose the problem the new product will solve. The five whys method is a great way to do this. The method involves looking closely at a problem that initially seems minor until the real reason is found. This can be done by asking “why” five times or until the real problem is found.
Now, it’s time to come up with a way to solve the problem that was described. This process includes coming up with ideas, deciding which features and functions are most important, and then making a prototype and trying it.
Framework for Product Discovery
A product discovery framework gives the whole process shape and direction. The steps a product team should take to go from the problem to the answer should look something like this:
- Discover: This is where the team learns and figures out what the problem is that the product needs to solve or what the real need is.
- Define: Once the problem has been found, it needs to be explained so everyone can understand.
- Develop: Now, the team needs to devise a way to solve the problem and make a prototype.
- Deliver—Finally, the prototype needs to be tested to ensure it solves the first discovered problem.
Why making product discovery better is a good idea
Improving how people find products has five main benefits.
- It helps you find your ideal customers by doing in-depth study on them
- Lowers production costs because businesses don’t have to spend a lot of money on early stages of product creation
- Raise the value of the product because it was made with the customer’s wants in mind.
- Brings to light and gets rid of risks since the product team has already found them during the research process
- It speeds up the development of a product because all of its features and functions have been carefully thought out to meet customers’ wants.
