Product Discovery Practices
Once we understand the Product Discovery Principles to succeed with Product Discovery it is time to see which are the product discovery practices that enable us to effectively deliver awesome experiences to our clients while driving business growth.
Product Discovery is about building the right products for the right customers.
First of all, you must identify who your customers are and what are their problems, then you have to translate those problems into prototypes you can test with your customers and finally decide what to build.
This is a continuous process that we visualize in our product discovery framework as the double learning loop: Exploration – Validation.
We explore the problem space and validate the solution space.
In this article we are going to explore the six core product discovery practices:
- Research
- Ideate
- Evaluate
- Prototype
- Test
- Learn
The Six Core Product Discovery Practices
Research
While there is no single best way of gathering customer insights, the best research plans answer specific questions and reduce unnecessary risks.
Research is a necessary component for ensuring that you understand the context in which purchasing decisions are made and for learning how products are used once they are in the hands of the end user.
A variety of research methods exist, so in order to select the best approach you should consider:
- the stage of the project
- the questions you’re trying to answer
- the resources available.
A common belief seems to persist that data is the cure to all business diseases. But, data fails to provide context. Why are customers behaving in a specific way? Why are customers choosing our competitors’ products instead of ours?
Indeed, data fails to provide crucial information about why customers make decisions and how they interact with products after they are purchased. It is notoriously bad at telling us how customers emotionally relate to products, how they use them in ways that companies never envisioned, and for how long they have been living with a product’s little annoyances, just waiting for a better solution to come around.
At the end of the day, offering a new solution requires deep insights into how and why decisions are made, what level of frustration will push customers to seek out new offerings, and what criteria new products and services will need to satisfy.
The best results come from the combination of qualitative and quantitative research techniques. Effective research plans involve a mix of methods, balancing the need for breadth of information with fast and inexpensive ways to get just-in-time insights.
Ideate
Ideation is the most creative of the product discovery practices. We want to generate ideas for solving customers’ problems.
From a practical point of view, what we want to do here is turn the outcome statements of the HOW to level of the Impact Map into ideas for solutions (or value propositions if you want).
When ideating we are not thinking about the specific implementation, but how we plan to solve customers' problems. We are ideating solutions, not products, services, or features.
Here you can use the ideation technique you like most. Just bear in mind the following basic principles for collaborative workshops:
- start with a clear goal
- timebox the exercises
- involve as much diverse skills and decision-takers as possible
- make it collaborative
- be open-minded
- do it iteratively and incrementally by building on each other's ideas.
Please, just avoid typical brainstorming as much as possible and use an external facilitator who is not involved in the product.
There are many techniques you can use for ideation. You can choose your favorite one or one of the following:
- How Might We …
- World Cafè
- Crazy Eight
- Six Thinking Hats
- Worst Possible Idea
- Brain Writing
- Mash Up
On Ideo’s site, you can find details of many ideation techniques.
In order to facilitate your ideation process in your team and across the organization you can use idea management software.
Evaluate
Now, it is time to decide what goes into Validation, what stays in Exploration, and what gets killed.
So, there are two things you need here:
- Screening Framework
- Prioritization Technique
Screening Ideas
Ideas need to be classified into three buckets: kill more research and validation.
For that, you must have a screening framework to make the process as objective as possible. Questions, such as the following ones can help you define your own idea screening process:
- What are the jobs this solution will help people get done in their lives?
- How important are these jobs in their lives?
- How satisfied are people with their current ability to get those jobs done?
- To what extent does this solution fit existing customer behavior?
- How many people is this solution aimed at?
- Does this solution alleviate any pain points?
- Does it create new ones?
Prioritization Technique
For those ideas that go into the Validation loop, you must prioritize them using a lightweight fast method like ICE Score.
ICE method was coined and popularized by Sean Ellis in his book “Hacking Growth”. It is a quick and effective way to prioritize ideas for solutions.
- I – Impact
- C – Confidence
- E – Ease
ICE Score is calculated as the multiplication of Impact x Confidence x Ease.
Prototype
Next thing we must do is to build something we can show users, or have them use it.
Prototypes can have different degrees of fidelity and can serve different purposes depending on what we want to validate.
Before building the prototype we must define our validation questions. What do we want to validate?
We then build our prototypes, which can serve to execute several experiments (Tests), just one or the prototype being itself the actual test.
Having a good product designer on the team is essential to build effective prototypes quickly.
Just a caution note here. We are not building an MVP, this is just a prototype to validate an idea.
The different types of prototypes you might need depending on several variables:
- How much time do you have?
- How much evidence do you have right now?
- How much more evidence do you need?
- What do you want to validate: usability, desirability, feasibility
The list is huge:
- Paper Prototype
- Storyboard
- Data Sheet
- Brochure
- Explainer Video
- Pretend to Own
- Clickable Prototype
- Mash-Up
- Concierge
- Wizard of Oz
- Landing Page
- Presale
- Mock Sale
- 404 Page
As with Research, the best results are obtained by combining qualitative and quantitative tests or by doing successive tests from least to most evidence in an experiment funnel.
Test
Prototyping and testing are intimately related. Based on your validation questions you will define your experiments and the prototypes you need to perform those experiments.
Some prototypes will serve as a platform to run multiple experiments and some others will be used just once.
To organize your testing efforts we recommend you use experiment cards or testing cards in order to define your hypothesis, experiments, and success criteria.
You can use this one which is an adaptation of the Test Card in the book Value Proposition Design by Alex Osterwalder.
Learn
The purpose of Product Discovery is to outlearn the competition: to learn faster than anybody else what to build for the right audience.
This is probably the most important of all product discovery practices. Learn from your product discovery process and decide what to do.
So, based on the results of your experiments you must decide what to do: Build, Kill, Pivot, or Persevere.
- Build – Here is when you can use some effective techniques to translate your product insights into successful features like Lean Inception or Story Mapping and start building your feature or MVP.
- Kill – you do not go forward with the idea because the hypothesis was invalidated by one of the experiments
- Pivot – you go back to the Exploring loop for the same idea because you learned something new that requires research
- Persevere – you continue in the Validation loop to perform more experiments on the same hypothesis because your insights are not conclusive
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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.