Importance of Continuous Modern Product Discovery
Start with Product Discovery
A week ago, I published a post about the product development life cycle. I placed higher importance on planning and discovering stage of the product development process. This stage comprises all work needs to be done before development effort is made.
Particularly I described the process of validation of our assumptions about an initial product strategy. It is extremely important to pass through the process of product strategy validation, especially before you start developing the new product or when you need to pivot.
Despite the fact that the product strategy has a dynamic character, generally, it is not updated after every idea is supposed to be implemented in reality. The product strategy sets a direction. It contains a list of key customer problems and value propositions. Yet you will need to narrow them down to be more specific about customer and user pain points to come up with better solutions.
Therefore product teams need to do continuous modern product discovery to reduce the risk of promotion of mistaken ideas. Indeed, a product vision and product strategy should serve for dropping ideas that are not aligned with the purpose of a product. However, many ideas, that contribute to the product strategy, may seem to be brilliant from our perspective. Do customers think the same? The best way to find it out is to test the riskiest ideas by running experiments to ensure that the continuously emerging ideas can be considered as opportunities.
I did research on modern product discovery. Before I did it, I had been only familiar with its general concept. A few days ago, I started delving into details since I realize how the deep knowledge about continuous product discovery is crucial for building the right product. I wish to give credit to Teresa Torres and Marty Cegan for their great work in shaping the direction of modern product discovery culture. I found services ProductTalk.org and svpg.com immensely helpful to gain the knowledge and reduce chances of your product to fail.
Learn fast
The goal of continuous product discovery is to learn fast. The faster you have evidence that your assumptions about value, usability, feasibility, and business viability are true, the lower risk to release wrong product or feature.
Nowadays many product teams are good at delivering fast. Modern software development processes enable us to remove impediments, improve the quality of a solution, and speed up delivery of value to customers by working in sprints and doing continuous integration and deployment. I believe that product teams should be good at continuous product discovery to the same extent.
What exactly product teams should learn about as fast as possible? According to Teresa Torres, there are two dimensions of continuous product discovery: discovery of opportunities and discovery of solutions. In other words, we need to look for new opportunities by learning more about customers problems and needs to figure out what to build next. I think finding an answer to the question “What to build next?” is the biggest challenge for a product manager. Indeed, a product strategy, that aligns business goals and market needs, should show steps to be taken to realize the product vision and contribute to business objectives.
For example, imagine our purpose is to “help companies spend less time on daily maintenance of swimming pools”. This is the desired outcome. It can be either a product vision or quarterly product objective.
From the validated product strategy, we may learn that “an operator should visit several dozen pools a few times a day to measure parameters of water quality and control them locally”. This is a problem statement that I consider as an opportunity.
Also, we may know from the previous research that “we want to enable customers to measure and control these parameters remotely”. This is a solution.
We can easily draw a diagram to visualize what is written above. For this purpose, I want to make use of an element of the Opportunity Solution Tree by Teresa Torres.
Imagine the product is launched. Since customers start using it, we need to take advantage of discovering new opportunities to decide on “What do build next?”. We need to understand customers better to build empathy and come up with new ideas.
Imagine we conducted customer research. We learned that “now the operator can control the parameters sitting in the room but he still needs to visit each pool once a week to check a condition of a filter. Since now an operator doesn’t visit pools every day, he needs to maintain a list not to miss a day of a filter control for every pool”. This is a new opportunity that contributes to the same outcome.
The new opportunity triggers new solutions. As a product manager you need to bring together key team members and stakeholders to ideate solutions.
Very often we start from a solution. We need to start with an outcome, find an opportunity and then provide the best solution. Ideas on solutions emerge from a deep understanding of customers.
Imagine as a result of brainstorming, a product team comes up with a solution “enable an operator to inform the app on dates of a filter control. Then the app will send a push notification to remind about an upcoming control.” We need to collect evidence whether this assumption is true. It seems to be true but remember that customers know better what they need. Therefore we should test our assumptions by running experiments.
Imagine after customer research, we learned that these solutions can work for a customer but operators would like to visit a pool only when a filter is clogged. We also learned about how the operator understands when the filter needs to be cleaned up. This knowledge can help to look at an opportunity from another perspective. Since the operator may wish the app to control the clearness of the filter, the opportunity “time is spent on maintenance of a list” evolves into “time is spent on manual filter monitoring.”
A product team should come up with new solutions based on the knowledge from the latest research. Imagine that the team decides to “enable the app to measure pressure in a filter remotely and send a push notification when a threshold is reached.” Again the assumptions should be tested.
These solutions seem to be better, don’t they? The initial solutions are good enough but they don’t solve an underlying problem — to limit the number of visits of an operator to pools that can lead to reduced effort towards their maintenance.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, modern product discovery is a continuous process.
At the stage of product planning and discovery, the product discovery is aimed at reduction of value, usability, feasibility, and business viability risks since you may have an idea that seems to be great. But this fact doesn’t guarantee that your potential customers and users think the same.
After a product is launched, product discovery needs to be continuously done to allow ideas to emerge from a deep understanding of customers. You need to constantly close the gap between what customers know and what you possibly know to build better solutions.
