How to do Product discovery: A Comprehensive Guide for Aspiring Product Managers

Product discovery is the process of understanding and identifying customer needs, pain points, and opportunities in order to create a successful product. In the discovery phase, you identify the most important customer problem, design solutions to solve the identified problem and validate potential solutions. It is a  process of reducing uncertainty as you find problems worth solving and solutions worth building. In this article, we will discuss different methods of product discovery and provide a comprehensive guide for aspiring product managers.

Methods of Product Discovery:

User Research: The process of understanding the needs, behaviors, and pain points of your target audience. A precursor to this is identifying “what do you want to learn and from whom?” Depending on your answer and the goal, there are several methods of user research that one can use.

• - Surveys: Surveys can be used to gather quantitative data about customer demographics, behaviors, and preferences. SurveyMonkey and Google Forms are popular survey tools.
• - Interviews: Interviews allow you to gather qualitative data and insights about customer needs and pain points. You can conduct interviews in person, over the phone, or through video conferencing tools like Zoom or Skype.
• - Focus groups: Focus groups allow you to gather feedback from a group of customers and observe their interactions with your product. Focus groups can be conducted in person or online though the former works much better.

There are several tools like usertesting.com, that even recruit participants matching your specific criteria. You should also speak to sales, customer success and support to double down on your insights. Customers often shield a problem with a proposed solution and you need to sidestep that to get to the root cause. The hardest part is often distilling the numerous voices down into cohesive action.

Here are some ways to further breakdown the feedback:

• - What kind of feedback is it ? Is it a defect or an unmet need ?
• - Is the scope limited to a specific user flow or is it a larger strategic issue ?
• - Is the feedback anecdotal or can it be extrapolated ?
• - What is the weightage of the feedback ? Is it a dealbreaker, table stakes or something aspirational ?
• - Is the feedback not related to the product ?

Micro-feedback, once verified by the QAs can make it to the backlog. Macro-feedback must be further discussed with more stakeholders in a planning session. Incremental opportunities that align with the current strategy must be added to the roadmap unless already catered. The identified customer problems then must be prioritized and transformed into opportunities.

Competitor Analysis: It involves analyzing your competitors' products, features, and marketing strategies to identify gaps and opportunities in the market. You can conduct competitor analysis by:

• - Analyzing their website, social media, and marketing materials
• - Reading and watching videos on customer reviews of their products
• - Testing their products and features

It's important to note that blindly following your competitors' actions is not an optimal strategy. Instead, it's crucial to investigate with curiosity the reasons behind pursuing a certain course of action.

Data Analysis: Product Analytics will tell you what customers are doing across their customer journey. Interviewing customers will tell you WHY they are doing it. Data analysis involves analyzing customer data, such as website traffic, customer behavior, and sales data, to identify trends and opportunities. Ideally, this step helps you build a hypothesis, which you then validate with customers through research.

This is also helpful in deriving the impact of solving a problem. By extrapolating different data points you can come up with a confidence range of the impact that solving a problem can have which is an indication of whether it is worth solving.

Prototyping and Testing: This involves creating a prototype of your product and testing it with customers to gather feedback and validate assumptions. Ideally, you should test your riskiest assumptions when cost and effort are the lowest. There are several prototyping and testing methods, including:

• - Paper prototyping: A low-fidelity prototyping method that involves sketching out your product on paper and testing it with customers. Ideally, this should not be used with real users unless there are tight timelines.
• - Wireframing: High fidelity prototypes that users can actually play around with.
• - A/B testing: A testing method that involves testing two versions of your product or feature to determine which one performs better.

I personally use the “Sprint Book” as reference when trying to solve big problems. We have a group of engineers, designers, UX researchers along with key stakeholders participate in the discovery process depending on the product.

Product discovery helps you expand within your market, move into new ones, stay ahead of the competition, and adapt to changing trends. Without discovery, products tend to stagnate by getting stuck focusing on the short-term. Before the delivery stage, each idea tends to be validated and tested on the real user, mitigating the risk of building the wrong thing.