Learn Design Thinking to Jumpstart Product Discovery
Product Discovery was the most difficult thing for me to grasp in the beginning. There are many different resources, yet no definition, process description, or something to apply immediately. It all becomes clearer when you take a look at Design Thinking first.
In general, Product Discovery is the phase during product development where you figure out what to build. Product Delivery is the usually well-understood process of actually creating the value. But how do you get there?
In this article I will talk about …
🥜 The Design Thinking phases in a nutshell
📐 How frameworks fall into one or more Design Thinking phases
💪 How you can apply this to your discovery work (by leveraging your Customer Support and Sales team, and start interviewing customers)
What most discovery frameworks have in common
When researching Product Discovery you will eventually stumble upon Teresa Torres' articles on Continuous Discovery. She created the Opportunity Tree that connects opportunities to business outcomes.
In short, you run weekly customer interviews to discover opportunities, and see if they contribute to an outcome. Then you test prototypes or run experiments until you've determined what to build.
There are also books like “Value Proposition Canvas” or “Testing Business Ideas” by Alexander Osterwalder et al. Both contain tools and techniques to learn about the market and your customers.
But… do I start with the tree, with outcomes, or with a canvas? Do both principles complement each other? Or should I do something completely different, like Design Sprints, Lean UX, or personas?
In hindsight, both approaches (and others) make sense to me but I couldn't put them to practice when I started learning product management. Then I realized that most frameworks build on tools and principles from the Design Thinking universe.
🥜 The Design Thinking Phases in a Nutshell
I understand the Design Thinking phases as Empathy, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. The goal is to have a holistic, people-centric view of the value you intend to create. A healthy combination of understanding your customers, being creative, and failing/learning fast.
Empathy, Definition, and Ideation
You start with understanding the problem to solve and empathizing with your (potential) customers. You will find out what their needs and challenges are through observations, interviews and other methods. This alone gives you tons of ideas for your product.
But you have to decide what to tackle first. There are various methods to do that, from simple dot voting to more complicated methods.
After that you open up the solution space by through creativity and generating lots of ideas. Again, you focus on one solution to pursue further.
Prototyping and Testing
The next two phases are about receiving customer feedback. You build a prototype that you show to your customers, and receive valuable feedback. This prevents you from wasting precious engineering time on misunderstood products.
The Macro Structure in Design Thinking
You can see the phases as one cycle that fits into a larger picture. One iteration of the Design Thinking phases may result in several ideas, each worth pursuing. You can ask more or different customers, run more experiments, and test more prototypes.
Then, at some point, a clearer picture of the product you need to build will emerge. That's when you start to converge and nail down a single promising solution until you are ready to release it.
📐 How Product Discovery Frameworks Fit Into the Picture
Those are the same things you need during product discovery to figure out what to spend time on. And they are also the foundation of most discovery processes out there. You will always find that a framework uses on one or more of the Design Thinking phases to varying degrees. All frameworks tackle the product risks of desirability, feasibility, and viability in some way.
You can avoid a missing desirability by understanding customer needs in the Emphathy phase. Examples from the above mentioned frameworks are:
Running regular customer interviews in the Continuous Discovery by Teresa Torres
Spending enough time on creating a Value Proposition Map in the books by Osterwalder et al.
When your product idea sounds great but your engineers can't realize it, you're missing feasibility. This isn't tackled in great detail but at least mentioned in the Continuous Discovery model. Also, the books “Testing Business Ideas” and “Inspired” (by Marty Cagan) suggest different methods to mitigate this risk.
Viability is usually missing when you forgot to include someone with pricing experience. 😉
Product Discovery Frameworks = Empathy + Prototyping + Testing
Thus, most discovery frameworks are recipes with the right ingredients to run the Design Thinking phases. They all build empathy with your customers, prototype and test possible solutions to get quick feedback on what might be worth to develop.
The extra flavours added help you to organize one or more teams, set goals, organize your ideas, or to align with stakeholders.
Empathy, prototyping, and testing are the foundation of every product discovery process. And you can start rightaway.
💪 How to apply this to your product discovery work
I found that there are two easy ways to start empathizing with customers immediately:
Start interviewing your customers
Make a Focus Group with your customer service and sales team
Start Interviewing Customers
It depends on your product, what kind of customers you start with, and what you will ask them, so I can't give any generic advice on that. But I found that it's no trouble to find interviewees, and that especially in B2B, customers are usually very keen to express their opinion.
Will you do the perfect interview the first time with the perfect customer that tells you everything you need to know? No, you won't. But it won't matter, just start and the rest will follow.
The more customers you interview, the more personas and patterns will emerge, that you can base future developments on. The big advantage is that you've based those personas on real people and their needs, and not on wishful thinking.
Start a Customer Service/Sales Focus Group
Another thing you can start immediately is talking to your customer service and sales folks every other week or so. They are usually the closest to your customers, know a lot about them, and receive a lot of feedback every day.
With both rather simple methods, you will kickstart a great discovery process. You will discover a lot of insights and ideas to pursue further to make your customers happy.