Product Discovery & Design Thinking

Introduction

As you climb the ladder in product management, there comes a time when you are bestowed with a crucial and difficult task on your product. This responsibility will be a goal such as to improve something on the product such as a particular funnel or number of users, grow the business for the product, find new avenues to increase financial growth, keep the competition at bay, etc. What do you do then? Trust your gut and experience and come with a solution? Use a large quantity of data and get lost in analyzing it? Build the same exact piece present on your competition’s product? What would you do? What should you do if it’s the first time you’re tasked to do this ?

The answer is Product Discovery. So, in this chapter we will discuss everything about understanding and structuring product discovery. Here’s what will be covered : –

1. What is Product Discovery?
2. Phases of Product Discovery and Structuring Product Discovery
3. Understanding Design Thinking and stages of design thinking
4. Considerations

In order to understand Product Discovery & Design Thinking and product discovery properly, we need to understand Problem Space & Solution Space .

Product Discovery

Product Discovery is a structured iterative process of reducing uncertainty around a problem or an idea by gathering sufficient amounts of evidence to ensure the right product gets built for the right set of audience.

While Product Discovery aims to come up with a solution for a problem, the process of Product Discovery relies on spending a majority of time in the problem space rather than solution space.

It is a method to deeply understand your customers to develop products that perfectly suit their(customer’s) needs.

In Product Discovery, you need to: –

1. Understand & clearly state the problem & needs.
2. Identify value for customers (potential & existing) and also identify value for our own business.
3. Eventually, discover the possible solutions in collaboration with Product, Stakeholders, engineering & design.

In order to understand Product Discovery & Design Thinking and product discovery properly, we need to understand Problem Space & Solution Space .

Problem Space:

Problem Space is actually a phase and a time when you are directed to solve problems or have identified some gaps leading to problems which need to be solved. Problem Space is that dimension in product management wherein you as a Product Manager care, define and understand problems in a particular segment, domain, area or if it’s an existing application (product) then the problems in its periphery. It is the time when you spend most of the time during product discovery (which we’ll learn ahead). It’s here where you ask and understand questions such as : –

• What is the problem?
• Who are the people facing this problem ?
  • Who are the people desperately seeking for a solution?
• What is the Target Accessible Market (TAM) ?

In the problem space, you need to spend all the time understanding the problem thoroughly.

You should NOT worry and think about the solution when you are in problem space.

We will talk about Solution Space ahead upon understanding design thinking and a touch of discovery.

Phases of Product Discovery

Product Discovery is performed in a non linear iterative structure around 6 phases. These are: –

1. Alignment
2. Research
3. Ideation
4. Creation (Prototype & MVP)
5. Validation
6. Refinement

Let’s understand each.

1. Alignment:

Alignment is the phase wherein you need to bring all the stakeholders of the product to understand the problem and the outcome that the solution will give upon completion.

Outcome, yes outcome is what you need to focus on heavily not only during alignment all through the product development process. 

The reason we need to start with alignment is to ensure that the vision and mission of the product is set clear and what we’d be seeking as a part of the discovery process and what will be delivered eventually has to be understood and explained correctly to everyone.

It is very important to get the implementation team, the engineers on board during the alignment. A product team bringing in engineers after all the strategic and research phases is bound to build a crap of a product all along the development.

A frequent anecdote from the alignment phase is when an impactful executive tries to or blatantly muscles in a pet project or an idea for the product which may not necessarily align with what the goal and outcome is for the product. It is important to take this carefully and navigate through such a situation. Honestly, there is no right or an apt way to deal with it I can suggest here. You need to navigate through.

2. Research:

Product Research should always begin with clearly stating the intent of it in alignment with the problem being solved.

It should begin with collecting insights from multiple sources, strongly backed by data. It should validate and debate around multiple perspectives and should eventually lead you to the truth.

While this may possibly sound quite generic if you happen to work in research, but as a Product Manager, this is what you truly need to keep in mind.

The second part of research comes from addressing customers (existing or potential or both) by understanding them, by talking to them. While good research will help you understand the possible problem users are facing, you need to understand that

No matter how strong and a competent PM you may be, no matter how good your product is, if it does not solve problems or your target/intended/existing customers, then your product is bound to fail.

So, first clearly understand who is facing the problem you’re building a solution for. If you’re a SaaS based product org with a target customer base of medium to large corporations and delivering a sales pitch, there if your prospect states that they’ll need a ton of meetings and approvals to come back to eventually sign the contract, then they aren’t your customers nor will they ever be. This is because, even if they do buy your product, eventually they would churn out because they could never find value.

This is where being Empathetic becomes important which we’ll discuss further ahead in design thinking. 

3. Ideate:

We won’t stress on techniques here like customer journey maps, Heat Maps, Process Flow Diagram, Northstar Statements etc as the primary intention should be focused on solving the problem. Sit down, bring in all possible stakeholders across disciplines and ideate. Come up with all possible solutions keeping in mind no budget limits. In ideation, quantity always supersedes quality. So create an environment during ideation that everyone participates proactively and contributes towards solving the problem.

A Feature or a Product is just a well packed solution. Hence, building hypothesis around the solution should be the primary motive rather than designing a feature to solve the problem.

Techniques such as Board Thinking, Convergent Brainstorming, etc can also be employed to achieve a fruitful ideation.

4. Prototype the Experience:

To execute ideas, we need to prototype the experience we are eventually delivering to the customers to seek value from our product.

Instead of focusing on building a state of the art prototype, neat and clean , focus on prototyping experiences, best for the product & simulating them. The focus should be on experimenting to validate assumptions & hypotheses. 

The entire notion of having the MVP just good enough to solve the problem but with a terrible experience or the whole idea of fail early fail cheap or fail fast or whatever leads you to take decisions and building products which have a dirty outcome

5. Validation:

This phase is aimed towards testing the most critical assumptions of discovery through experiments. List all the ideas selected and then create or define the experiments for each to validate the idea. This should again be fed in the product and reflects in the prototype. One of the crucial steps in validation is to be closely aligned with the customers in order to understand the value chain towards reaching the outcome.

6. Refinement:

Refinement is when you need to redefine validated ideas for focused delivery. Here, we need to refine our product, focus on reducing the scope of MVP by ensuring that it focuses on the most valuable feature without compromising on quality.

Now that we’ve learnt what Product Discovery is along with phases of it, it is finally time to understand Solution Space.

Solution Space:

While it is obvious by the name itself that solution space is where the solution resides. There’s more to it. Solution Space is actually about understanding how customers are solving the same problem without your solution. This is the time when evaluate your hypotheses to understand and answer the following questions: 

• What do people like and dislike about the current available solutions? Your solution or your competitor’s solution.
• Has anyone else solved the problem? If yes and if there are many, why will a person choose your product over others? What’s unique about your solution?
• But if no one has solved the problem yet, why is that? Is it difficult and unviable ? Why is it difficult if it is?
• Keeping yourself in customer’s shoes, do you honestly feel that your solution will provide value to the customers?

Now as we’ve looked through the product discovery process which honestly is quite exhausting to the mind and also takes up quite some time which may lead you to ask,

Is Product Discovery really necessary?

Unlike a sprint or a release, product discovery is an outcome based process rather than an output based process.

It is not aimed for coming up with features but coming up with solutions that focus on delivering value to the customer while generating opportunities of growth for your organization.

This mindset leads to saving money in the long run while pinpointing revenue generating opportunities right at the beginning. 

Thus product discovery aims to lower the risks around what gets built upon getting a direction. Omitting this process and phase leads to a product completely missing the user’s needs.

What are the things to consider during Product Discovery?

1. Avoid jumping straight away to solutions without research and data to back it.
2. Avoid not involving engineers early enough. If your engineering team is not part of any initial discussions about the problem being solved, they will never be able to bring in value no matter how detailed and well articulated your specifications are. Never separate the discovery team from the delivery team.
3. At the same time, avoid involving almost everyone in such discussions simply to cut noise.
4. Have the right product mindset.

Design Thinking:

So Design Thinking is an iterative process in which we seek to understand the problems, the users facing the problems, the challenges people have faced in order to come up with a solution , all in order to attempt to identify primary and alternative strategies and solutions. 

Design thinking provides an approach towards solving a problem in a structured manner, eventually leading to solution. The design thinking process and the product discovery is quite similar. 

Product Discovery answers the question of “What will a person use to solve this problem ?” whereas Design Thinking is more centered towards the interface and experience of the solution and therefore answers the question “How will the solution look and how will I access the solution to solve the problem ? 

Let’s understand this difference in an example.

Example – Go back a few years, say anytime before the first half of 2016 in the Indian demographic. The normal mode of transaction is Cash. But the issues with it are known for over centuries, at least a couple of centuries. There’s a risk in carrying physical money, to possess money you need to either visit a bank or an ATM, a process which is time consuming and inconvenient.

Now assume that there’s no UPI infrastructure or simply UPI doesn’t exist and your company decides to build a product which enables people to transfer money seamlessly over the internet into their account in a couple of clicks.

Product Discovery will lead you to come up with a hypothesis that you’ll build an application which links a person’s bank account to the application, enabling him/her to send money to another person registered on the application over the internet.

Design Thinking when employed and coupled to this product thinking will lead you to answer questions such as How will I as a user link my bank account with the app? How will I identify another user to whom I’m supposed to send money or receive money from? Will I be able to check my account balance without the need to switch to the bank’s application ? etc

The answers to these questions should reflect in UI and UX on the application enabling users to seek value.

Now let’s understand the process of Design Thinking.

Design Thinking, a process:

Almost in every sense, the design thinking process is quite similar to the Product Discovery process. The stages of design thinking are:-

1. Empathize
2. Define
3. Ideate
4. Prototype
5. Test

The rationale behind each phase is exactly similar to that of Product Discovery but intended purely and purely on the user experience and the user interface for the solution being built.

This is Product Discovery and Design Thinking.

Takeaways:

In this chapter we took a look at what Product Discovery is and how when coupled with Design Thinking leads us to come up with unique solutions to solve actual problems.

In the next chapter, we will understand and learn Product Roadmaps.