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 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.
Successful innovators and modern product people operate with a different sets of beliefs.
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.
Below are the ten product discovery principles that guide great product teams.
Let’s see the product discovery principles in more detail.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.