Product discovery is a method that focuses on understanding the problem rather than creating the solutions. It plays a key part in choosing what products, projects or features should you focus on and which may not be as promising as you thought.
Product discovery process is about consistently finding out what your users need, what are their goals and pains. It's about choosing to build the right product instead of quickly delivering something that won't be beneficial either for you or your users.
The first step on a product discovery journey is setting a goal that you want to achieve with your project. It’s important to know whether you want to get better NPS, attract new customers, raise a product revenue or something else. Thus you will be able to focus on your main goal in later phases when you will be prioritizing your opportunities and solutions.
Getting to know your users is one of the most important parts of the product discovery process. You need to understand how they think, what are their goals they want to achieve through your product, what are their pains and gains. By being close to your users, you will make a product for users, not change your users according to your product.
Thanks to the knowledge of your users’ behaviour you will know what problems, goals and fears they have. The findings from your research will be turned into the opportunities which you will incorporate in your product in the next steps. This process is always with regards to goals you want to achieve.
There is not only one solution to your opportunity. You can usually create much more than that. The more solutions you create, the better you’ll be able to choose from the options that will benefit you the most at the moment. Your team should be creating solutions together - that way you will get diverse opinions and perspectives together.
How to choose the right solution? You should look at the problem from these three angles:
a) feasibility - what is the technical or legal demandingness?
b) viability - does this solution help you achieve your business goals?
c) desirability - is this something that your users need? Does it help them to achieve their goals?
Based on these three criteria you might be able to choose a solution that considers what is the best choice for you and your users.
Your product or feature is almost ready but it’s not the time to make it public yet. You should find out whether your users are able to use the product. The Usability test is a great research method that will help you with it. You will be able to adjust parts of your product before implementing which saves you a lot of valuable time and money.
