It’s quite tempting to rush into development and enter the market with a unique product that has no alternatives so far. However, getting started without a clear understanding of the problems that are to be solved is a bad idea, definitely. If only there were a kind of navigation map to guide your right to success.
Well, there is one – product discovery.
This comprehensive data-driven research allows a product management team to evaluate the idea, identify the software’s strengths and weaknesses upfront, as well as define how, where, when, and if the product should evolve. Once you have a complete vision of the market’s current state, user pain points, and your product’s potential, you can do better planning and minimize risks.
This also contributes to a more cost-efficient and seamless development process without delays. Through in-depth product discovery, you are more likely to build a solution that caters to your target audience’s specific requirements and wants.
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Why Product Discovery Services are Necessary
A large portion of software projects fail completely or partially due to unmet requirements – either cost, timeline, quality, or requirements objectives. According to numerous studies, 50%-80% is the average failure rate of software projects.
In order to not step on the same rake, stakeholders should initiate product discovery first. The benefits it brings can make a significant difference to the development cycle and eventually to the product performance. They are as follows:
- Correct planning and clear objectives. During the discovery stage, requirements are defined and therefore the risk of wasting resources is significantly reduced. With a deep knowledge of the target market, industry, and competitors you can make profitable investments and boost your competitiveness.
- Adequate forecast for business opportunities of your product. Which is accessible by identifying problems that your solution can effectively solve, finding out the best way to reach your objectives, and validating your business idea and hypotheses.
- Strong value proposition right from the start.
- Product cost and development time estimates. In the course of product discovery, you can see where it is possible to reduce the costs and time required for the development and obtain long-term benefits without losing on the quality of the product.
- Agility and flexibility. The deliverables of the product discovery stage are essential for crafting a customized product strategy that can be easily modified during the development cycle on demand.
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Product discovery outcomes
Product discovery is a resource-consuming procedure. Yet it is worth the investment. You will get meaningful deliverables that will set the right direction for your further operations.
- Product business model that will serve as a roadmap through every step of the development cycle.
- Analysis of the target market, including key competitor research and buzzing market trends.
- Functional competitor decomposition with deep analysis of competitors’ feature sets
- ICP and Personas with defined problems and desires your target audience has.
- A complete product concept as a strategy foundation and a vision of what the future solution will be.
- The approved feature set with defined priorities. Functional modules are broken down into Epics and User Stories to organize workflows and achieve effective communication, collaboration, and understanding of the product development process.
- Development expense estimation is done based on every feature assessment.
- Full project budget.
- Required team stack of technical and non-technical specialists, which should be involved in the project implementation.
- A step-by-step implementation plan will help you predict the project duration and set realistic deadlines.
- MVP scope.
- Suggested technology stack.
- Cloud infrastructure configuration and cost evaluation.
Steps of Product Discovery
The discovery stage is not only about shaping the future digital product but also about securing opportunities for improving the product incrementally and consistently. To perform effective research and obtain meaningful deliverables, a client-oriented approach based on the best market practices is required.
Before you get started precisely with the product discovery, it’s crucial to identify key roles and responsibilities, develop and approve the RACI Matrix, plan the workflow, and ensure proper communication. Once you’re done with it, you should act according to the following plan:
Data extraction
This is the research itself. It starts with the project scope clarification and KPIs establishment. Next, research and analyze the market to prove the viability of your idea. At this step, you’ll see how much of the information you need to find the product-market fit. Depending on the product itself, it will drastically vary.
The “Four big risks” are to be considered at the very beginning – value risk, usability risk, feasibility risk, and business viability risk.
After that, explore the trends as well as your direct and indirect competitors. This will help you to get a relevant functional decomposition of their products by features. to correctly define your UVP and marketing positioning model.
Along with that, uncover the critical user needs through customer feedback surveys, customer interviews, and product usage analysis. It is the most daunting but useful part of the research, as it will help you to get a clear understanding of who you’re developing your product for. As a result, you will be able to form clear ICP and personas with actual user concerns.
Ideation
The previous stage was focused on understanding the customer’s problem. At the ideation stage, you plan how to address it. This involves analyzing the data and customer insights gathered in the research phase. Ideation takes a lot of collaborative work and brainstorming and then narrowing down to the best ideas.
Sebastien Phlix, Product Manager at N26 suggests checking the ideas according to the following template to single out those worth investment:
- Alignment with your business goals.
- Relevance for your target customer segment.
- High potential upside based on a back-of-the-envelope calculation.
- Early customer interest.
- Would it be stupid not to give the idea a try?
This way you can figure out which idea to prototype. At this stage, you also should determine project requirements, specify user roles, and design the feature set.
Planning and estimation
The final step of the discovery process is to create a mockup or MVP and get customer feedback on it.
For this, you need to prioritize your product’s core features to present the value. Then come comprehensive user testing, iterations, and continuous improvement.
At this moment, the discovery phase deliverables are introduced to the client and the tech stack for further development is selected.
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Challenges in the Discovery Phase
End-to-end discovery is a pivotal phase in the product lifecycle. Yet it comes with certain challenges too.
Understanding and foreseeing the discovery stage challenges is essential. If not handled properly, they can lead to unproductive results and wasted resources. This, in turn, will hinder the following steps – design, development, and launch. We’ve gathered some of the most widespread pitfalls of product discovery in the list below:
Involving a cross-functional team
It takes a lot of experts with diverse expertise to conduct a deep discovery. Having highly skilled specialists running it will minimize risks, speed up the process, and reduce costs. The key roles responsible for the discovery phase all the way include product manager, product designer, and lead engineer.
Bringing together people with different functional expertise to work toward a common goal is a prerequisite for obtaining meaningful outcomes.
Handling biases
Biases exist. But they should never impact product development.
Biases can destroy even the most ingenious product if they keep a development team from meeting real users’ needs. It’s essential to take into account facts that contradict your beliefs – not only those that confirm them. You should consider user feedback – especially the negative one.
Avoid the IKEA effect – the tendency to overvalue things that we made ourselves.
Involve different perspectives who can spot things you might have overlooked and stay objective to eliminate biases and save your project from failure.
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Running in-depth discovery
Though it seems easy on the surface, product discovery requires a lot of time, effort, and investment.
So how long should the discovery phase take? Tricky question. In fact, it always depends on the project’s scope and complexity, the market you’re focusing on, and the target audience you’re trying to reach.
Discovery can be completed within different timeframes – from a few weeks to a few months.
So don’t be guided by strict deadlines here. Instead, spend as much time as required to obtain exhaustive information.
Non-stop discovery
The technology landscape is highly dynamic and competitiveness keeps rising steadily. That is why implementing an ongoing discovery process makes sense.
Its primary goal is to uncover your users’ needs and find ways to address them. But these needs are changing all the time so approaches must evolve similarly. You need to keep an eye even on minor shifts to make user-centric decisions.
It doesn’t mean doing time-consuming investigations all the time but rather simple research activities that won’t take many resources.
Selecting metrics to validate the solution
To confirm whether the proposed solutions or ideas are viable, meet user needs, and have the potential for success in the market, the right metrics must be tracked and analyzed.
These include user engagement metrics, customer satisfaction metrics, churn rate, conversion rate, performance metrics, bug density, and time to market. Measuring them will provide you with an objective understanding of how the product will perform.
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Conclusion
Can you skip the product discovery phase? Yes. But rushing into development without running a deep research first is too risky to leave it all up to chance. The possibility of risk mitigation and uncertainty elimination must be too tempting to activate high-quality product discovery. Making it a part of the development cycle will help you put your project on the right track and unlock new opportunities you could have never thought of before.
At Pecode, we know how to develop things right. Backed by years of experience and vast expertise, we enhance product creation with end-to-end research, feedback collection and analysis, and iterative improvement.
Our team can turn your idea into a commercially successful product.
Interested in cooperation? Then reach out to us right now and let’s start looking for the solution together.
