Product Discovery Principles are the foundation of successful product development in the 21st century. These are a set of core principles that drive how modern product teams do Product Discovery.
It is important to understand these principles because whenever a new technique or practice emerges you can easily see how it fits with your approach and adapt it to your specific context if needed.
In my experience trying to innovate and incorporate new methodologies as they have been emerging throughout my career (like Lean, Agile, Kanban, Lean Startup, or Design Thinking) I’ve witnessed how many people got attached to the practices, tools, techniques, and methodologies without understanding the underlying principles.
But, this never works and they blame the methodology. You cannot apply something successfully if you just implement the practices and tools without a proper understanding of the core principles.
Humans adore new shiny objects, but they will not easily change their mindset.
The Wrong Mindset
The problem that many companies suffer is that they operate based on dangerous assumptions, especially in times of great volatility and unpredictability.
Assumptions such as that they can predict the future, that they know what customers want, that they know how to build it, and that nothing will change along the way.
This is a recipe for failure.
If you want to become a modern product organization, the first thing you have to do is to change the way you perceive the world around you. That means acknowledging that you cannot predict the future and that you don’t know what customers want.
Product Mindset
Successful innovators and modern product people operate with a different sets of beliefs.
- They cannot take anything for granted
- Great products are built collaboratively rather than sequentially (in silos)
- Certain structures and processes are required to drive growth.
- The needs of the business are not the needs of the marketplace
- Most of our ideas, initiatives, features or products will fail miserably.
- Customers do not know what they want
- We don’t know what to build
- Stakeholders and executives cannot predict the future
- Clear strategic direction is required to align product discovery efforts
- Discovery is messy and unpredictable by nature
Those beliefs drive how modern product teams interpret the world and behave.
In the following section, we present the ten product discovery principles that drive how product teams work.
Product Discovery Principles
Below are the ten product discovery principles that guide great product teams.
- The Truth is Out There – The focus must be on the customer’s needs and not just on the needs of the business.
- Customer Discovery – Discover who your customers are and what they really need by observing them and interacting with them on a frequent basis throughout the product life cycle
- Validate before Building – Reduce uncertainty as much as you can before building anything.
- Minimize Risks – Risks are tackled up front, rather than at the end. Modern product teams tackle risks as soon as possible. These risks include Desirability, Usability, Feasibility, and Viability.
- Information Value – Go cheap and fast at the beginning and invest more as you reduce uncertainty and data confirms your hypothesis
- Co-creation – Products are defined and designed collaboratively, iteratively, and incrementally rather than sequentially by functions
- Autonomy – Enable full end-to-end product teams responsible for discovering and owning product strategy and solutions
- Direction – The discovery of a new business idea, new product, or new functionality must always respond to a strategic need
- Impact – It’s all about generating business results while solving problems for customers. It’s all about outcomes, not outputs
- Framework – Discovery is messy and unpredictable. Put some structure in place to organize your efforts, to be effective, and provide visibility
Let’s see the product discovery principles in more detail.
1 – The Truth is Out There
It is ok to have business expectations and some ideas about what to build or what customers are expecting, yet statistics are stubborn: most ideas fail.
Product Discovery addresses the root cause of many of those failures: building something nobody wants.
The focus of Product Discovery is to build something that customers will buy. And, there’s no way around it. To achieve that you must get out of the building.
You must focus on the market and business outcomes will come as a result.
2 – Customer Discovery
Customer Discovery means understanding the jobs our customers are trying to get done, their expected outcomes and pain points.
Is not about asking customers what they want (because they do not know). It is about observing and interviewing about their process, their problems, their drivers, and motivations.
It means getting their feedback from early prototypes and involving them in our discovery and delivery process.
3 – Validate before Building
The purpose of Product Discovery is to address these critical risks:
- Does anybody want this? (DESIRABILITY)
- Can they figure out how to use it? (USABILITY)
- Can we build it? (FEASIBILITY)
Product Discovery is an ongoing process of reducing uncertainty around an idea we have or a problem we want to solve.
It is the process of learning what to build, how to build it and for whom.
Note: there are also business viability and business feasibility risks, but we like to differentiate that from the core product discovery, which is about the customer, their problems, the experience, and the technical aspects of building the product.
Typically, companies spend most of their time and resources building stuff, but not enough discovering what to build. Additionally, time spent deciding what to build is typically an inward-looking process full of wishful thinking, opinions, and a lack of research and validation with customers.
Any idea, regardless of where is coming from (executives, customers, stakeholders, team) requires validation.
This shouldn’t be an issue, because the time and money spent on discovery is very little compared to the time and money spent on building a product. It can also save you lots of money by helping you kill ideas or pivot before is too late.
It provides you with real business agility.
4 – Minimize Risks
It is really fun to see how many companies start a new project, product or business idea by analyzing the risks, but not doing really much to tackle them upfront quickly and cheaply.
Every day you spend working on a Powerpoint or spreadsheet instead of evaluating your biggest risks is a day lost that might cost you millions.
Please, do not leave everything for the delivery teams. Most of the deadliest risks can be tackled upfront with little investment.
5 – Information Value
The more uncertainty you have the less information you will need to reduce that uncertainty drastically. So, go cheap and fast at the beginning and increase your spending as you reduce your uncertainty.
Look at your whole value stream and analyze how much time it takes to go from idea to market and what activities are involved.
All time spent behind closed doors is time lost. You should be involving customers early on and on a frequent basis throughout your product development process.
6 – Co-creation
I don’t think I have to insist too much on this principle nowadays. Co-creation is key to any successful endeavor.
This means involving a sufficiently wide set of skills in the process, including gate-keepers, stakeholders, and most importantly CUSTOMERS!
Customers should be recruited on an ongoing basis during exploration and validation.
7 – Autonomy
The best product teams integrate product discovery and product delivery in their normal operation. They own the product strategy, discovery, and delivery.
Modern product organizations enable end-to-end product teams with all the required skill sets to achieve a business goal.
This is the only way you can grow organically without losing agility and speed in the process.
8 – Direction
Product Teams do not need management, but they need direction and boundaries.
They must know at all times they are heading in the right direction and they need ways to measure progress and success.
So, the beginning of any Product Discovery effort is always a business goal. Be it a product performance problem for a growth team or a strategic goal for a product team.
9 – Impact
One of the key mindset shifts you must do to become a great product organization is to move from managing for outputs to managing for outcomes.
As a business owner, executive, product manager or product team your goal is to create an impact in your business thanks to creating an impact in the marketplace.
You must measure outcomes, not outputs.
10 – Product Discovery Framework
Product Discovery is often a messy process. It is non-linear and unpredictable and the size and type of work may vary tremendously every week.
Most people get excited when they are introduced to Product Discovery but they are usually overwhelmed by the unpredictability of the process. They don’t know what to do, when, and how much.
Having a structure helps product teams get started with Product Discovery by organizing their efforts, maximizing strategic alignment, and providing visibility to stakeholders, managers, and other teams.
Fake Product Discovery
Companies who don’t believe in these product discovery principles will affirm they are agile and modern but they will be practicing fake Product Discovery.
You can easily identify those companies by the following behaviors:
- Product Discovery is not “real” work; “real” work is only building stuff, so, in the best of cases, they will time-box product discovery efforts into specific techniques such as design sprints or lean inceptions to kick off new products or projects, or perhaps hackathons or innovation sprints once in a while. But, they will only accept features delivered as a measure of progress. Learning is not acceptable as a measure of progress.
- They believe they can predict the future so they work with feature-based product roadmaps rather than using outcome-based product roadmaps
- They assume their ideas will work so they invest upfront in building the infrastructure, the team, and the product and will only test after shipping just to realize it didn’t work
- “Customer is king” means they will throw into the development pipeline anything customers request, regardless of their own strategy and goals. They listen to what customers say rather than observing what customers do and don’t do.
I understand it is difficult to assume that you are wrong, that you need to involve customers in the process, and that you have to iteratively and incrementally test your solutions, but, like it or not, that’s the world we live in.
Product Managers play a key role in modern product organizations orchestrating the process from idea to market. It is a challenging and difficult job, but very much rewarding if you play it from the right set of assumptions, product discovery principles, practices, and tools.
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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.
