To implement an effective Product Discovery practice in your organization, it's essential to understand how product strategy and Product Discovery are interconnected.
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The product development process involves iteratively validating hypotheses from higher strategic levels to lower ones. This means moving from strategic hypotheses to business model hypotheses, to product hypotheses, and finally to technical hypotheses.
By understanding this process, you can better align your Product Discovery efforts with your overall product strategy.
Product Discovery plays a crucial role in bridging the gap between strategy and delivery. It's a process that iteratively and incrementally reduces uncertainty around a solution that's intended to address a strategic challenge.
In the following sections, we'll explore how Product Discovery relates to three strategic levels: product strategy, product goals, and product roadmap. By understanding these relationships, you can develop a more effective Product Discovery practice in your organization.
When crafting your product strategy through a strategy design process, there are two distinct phases: definition and validation.
The first phase focuses on increasing strategic awareness and identifying potential paths forward through the creation of strategic themes.
These themes are perhaps the most critical part of the strategy design process and are comprised of a strategic challenge, an opportunity, and a solution. This solution is defined by a 'Where to Play' and 'How to Win' decision, which together forms the basis of the strategic theme.
Once strategic themes have been evaluated and selected for execution, the second part of the strategy design sprint involves identifying assumptions and running experiments to validate them in order to select a winning strategy.
To summarize your strategy and connect it with your product vision, product mission, and sustaining product principles, you can use the Product Vision Board canvas provided below.
This canvas can help you visualize your product strategy and ensure that it's aligned with your overall vision and mission.
Once you've selected a strategic direction, it's important to validate it, and that's where product discovery comes into play. However, it's essential to differentiate between business discovery and product discovery.
While some product experts include both business validation and product validation under the Product Discovery umbrella, it's important to distinguish between these activities.
Business discovery is what you do once you have a candidate strategic theme in order to define the business model, identify the riskiest assumptions, and validate them.
This process involves gauging the market opportunity by analyzing the potential and the challenge. Essentially, business discovery tackles business viability risk and answers the question: "Is there a potentially viable, sustainable, and scalable business model?"
On the other hand, Product Discovery typically focuses on building the right thing by understanding the problem space and finding the best solution. This period involves finding the problem-solution fit and answering the question: "Can we build the right product for the right audience?"
While this process is not strictly sequential, it's important to start from the beginning and ensure that you have a sensible strategy. From there, you can define a potential business model around a market opportunity and ultimately design the product that will enable you to capture that market.
Imagine you're the founder of a shoe startup.
You'll first engage in a creative process to define your strategy. Once you have several strategic themes, you'll evaluate them using business discovery to gauge their potential and challenge. This will include aspects such as market size, cost, key activities, partnerships, revenue model, and time to revenue.
For the selected option, you'll then go one level deeper by engaging in a product discovery process to understand the needs of users/customers/channels, their jobs-to-be-done, and come up with a winning value proposition. This value proposition will then be validated through several experiments before building.
In this phase, you'll be validating desirability, feasibility, and usability through:
All of this will be done before ramping up mass production. In case any of the previous steps fail, you'll go back one step upstream and choose another option.
When your product is already in the market and you need to grow and compete, your Product Discovery efforts will likely be guided by a product goal, often in the form of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), or a product metric, such as a North Star Metric (NSM) or One Metric That Matters (OMTM).
The OKR framework is a powerful framework for product teams to define and measure success. By aligning specific product goals with quantifiable metrics, OKRs enable teams to prioritize their day-to-day activities and make strategic decisions.
Product goals are the natural consequence of product strategy, and it's important to keep the two concepts distinct.
One of the challenges of using OKRs in product management is syncing the discovery and delivery processes with goal cycles. In other words, syncing product strategy definition and review cycles with Product Discovery and delivery cycles.
To overcome this challenge, product teams need to prepare for upcoming delivery-oriented OKRs by setting exploratory OKRs in a previous cycle.
This approach allows teams to lay the groundwork for success without rushing through the discovery and delivery process. Of course, it's crucial to ensure that these OKRs are directly tied to actual strategic themes, rather than being used as a task list to keep the team busy.
A well-crafted Product Roadmap is the most typical source of inspiration and guidance for upcoming discovery priorities. A clear roadmap can make the priorities and activities you have chosen to pursue more tangible and accessible, providing a solid foundation for your Product Discovery efforts.
Roadmap design can directly impact the autonomy your team has for Product Discovery. If your team must to explore the problem space, but your roadmap requires the delivery of new features by next week, you risk overlooking potential areas for growth and improvement, resulting in a focus on refining existing solutions rather than uncovering new ones.
To ensure a successful product roadmap integration, it's essential to have high confidence in the current quarter's areas of focus while remaining open to new information and insights. An outcome-based roadmap approach with flexible time horizons that allow for increasing levels of abstraction as you project further into the future, can offer valuable guidance.
It's important to update the roadmap on a certain cadence and ensure it aligns with product strategy and goal review cadences. This approach allows your team to remain nimble, respond to changes in the market or user needs, and prioritize the most impactful work.
In summary, product roadmaps can be a valuable tool to guide product teams in prioritizing their work, but it's important to approach them with flexibility and openness to change. With a well-crafted roadmap, your team can successfully navigate the product discovery process and drive meaningful outcomes.
Integrating Product Discovery effectively into the value chain is crucial for the successful implementation of this practice within an organization. Rather than considering Product Discovery as an occasional or extravagant practice, it should be viewed as a standard part of modern product teams' operations.
Therefore, it is essential to ensure that Product Discovery is visible and seamlessly integrated with the main strategic product tool, which is the product roadmap.
The figure above depicts an example of a product roadmap implementation and the corresponding integration with the product discovery process that was established for one of my clients in their product organization.
As shown, initiatives entering the pipeline undergo a screening process, which ultimately determines whether to incorporate them into the roadmap or reject them. To be included in the roadmap, all initiatives must meet the necessary conditions to enter the "Ready for Discovery" buffer.
For example, the 'Ready for Discovery' checklist could be something like this:
To kick off the discovery process, the product team will first align and set clear objectives. The result of the process should be a decision to either discard the roadmap theme or incorporate it into the "Ready for Delivery" buffer.
By aligning your Product Discovery efforts with your overall product strategy, you can ensure that you're building products that meet your customers' needs, solve real problems, and achieve your business goals.
This approach can help you avoid the pitfalls of merely polishing pre-existing solutions and missing valuable discovery opportunities. With the right approach and tools, Product Discovery can become a natural and integral part of your organization's product development process.
In order to successfully implement a Product Discovery practice in your organization, it's important to understand the relationship between the different levels of product strategy and how they relate to Product Discovery.
At the highest level, you need to define your product's overall vision and strategic direction. Then, at the business level, you need to validate the viability of your business model and identify the riskiest assumptions. Finally, at the product level, you need to build the right thing by understanding the problem space and finding the best solution.
It's important to note that these levels are not strictly sequential and you may need to go back and forth between them as you validate your assumptions and adjust your strategy.
A well-crafted product roadmap is a crucial tool for integrating Product Discovery into the value chain and making sure that the right initiatives are prioritized and incorporated into the discovery process.
We help our customers to discover new sources of business growth by expanding into adjacent markets with an existing product, by introducing a new product to an existing market, or to a new market.
If you want to know how we can help you to start your Digital Product Discovery implementation you can check our Product Discovery Training and Product Discovery Consulting pages. If you prefer to start with the basics take a look at our Lean Product Management Training.