Product Discovery: What It Is and Why It’s Important to Adopt It
When developing digital products, assumptions are often made, and under the pressure to move fast and get the software “into production,” the validation of those assumptions is often skipped, posing a very high risk of exposure.
To reduce these risks and work more effectively and efficiently, Product Discovery emerged, focusing on determining early on what the right product to build is. If you want your company’s development process to be successful, then you should incorporate the practices and techniques of software product discovery services.
What is Product Discovery?
The primary goal of Product Discovery is to identify and validate early on the needs, challenges, and opportunities of the user to develop products that are perfectly aligned with their needs. This is achieved through a deep understanding of customers, their contexts, and their challenges.
Product discovery is a key component and is the initial phase of developing a solution, encompassing a set of techniques and practices derived from approaches such as Design Thinking, Lean Startup, Customer Research, and User Experience (UX).
Its main objective is to mitigate the risks associated with creating products that do not add value. Allowing teams to focus on innovative, validated, and meaningful solutions from the early stages, promotes more efficient development.
The lack of information about user needs affects not only the designer but the team as a whole. By clearly defining business rules, setbacks, and time losses in the search for information are avoided. After all, it is during the discovery phase when the necessary data is gathered for the product to fit perfectly with the customer’s needs.
How does it impact the company?
It is highly risky and costly to develop digital products that do not achieve the desired impact, both for users and for the business. Product Discovery helps teams decide which features or products to prioritize and ultimately build.
Product Discovery also benefits the company by avoiding additional expenses and team disruption due to cost reduction. Additionally, it increases the chances of product acceptance by the intended audience, maximizing opportunities to increase the company’s profitability in a shorter period.
What are the first steps to incorporate Product Discovery?
Focus on desired outcomes
The product team should not only focus on the development and production process but also on the subsequent outcomes, both for customers and users and for the company.
Gaining visibility and commitment to outcomes accelerates learning about user interaction with the product, allowing for more informed decisions and avoiding what will not work in the future.
User-centered design
Focusing on customers and users involves improving their experiences with the product, which translates into greater satisfaction and value. Understanding their needs and how they currently solve their problems is crucial for designing user-centered products. But how to achieve it?
Facilitate direct and regular access of the Product team to end-users. Depending on the product’s lifecycle phase, different challenges to solve will arise. For example, in the initial stages, the focus is on learning and defining the problem to solve, while in more advanced stages, the focus may be on optimizing attraction, conversion, and retention.
Mitigate risks with a continuous Product Discovery approach
Before developing a feature for a product, it is essential to mitigate four key risks: value for customers and users, business viability, usability, and technical feasibility.
It is important to understand that Product Discovery is not a preliminary stage done only at the beginning. Products have a lifecycle and must evolve as more knowledge about the market, customers, technology, and regulatory aspects is acquired. This is why it is essential to have a team of highly skilled professionals, autonomous, created, and managed exclusively for your business. Avalith is capable of providing personalized and quality solutions to help you achieve your goals.
So, Product Discovery is the process of researching and testing ideas to determine if they are viable to develop. This requires understanding the problem you are trying to solve, researching the market, creating user personas, and testing your ideas with potential customers. Additionally, it is one of several methods to create a strategy that allows you to improve your product. The choice of which technique and how it will be used depends on alignment and a search for the right answers about the functioning of the product and the impact it will have on the user.
So, before you start developing your next big idea, take some time to go through the Product Discovery process to achieve much more efficient development.