Product
discovery

This helps reduce misunderstanding and misaligned expectations later down the line.

Activities might include:

• Reviewing the history, context, and drivers for the initiative, and the product strategy, if there is one
• Defining what a successful discovery phase looks like
• Agreeing the scope of the problem space
• Mapping stakeholders
• Documenting the team's existing understanding of the users
• Identifying risks, assumptions and dependencies
• Agreeing the team's roles, responsibilities, and ways of working
• Getting access to, and setting up any necessary tools, like task boards, wikis, team communications platforms, and code repositories
• Creating a backlog and roadmap for the discovery phase

In this phase we focus on learning about the needs and constraints of your users, business, and technology through a variety of research and analysis techniques.

Learning about your users

Who are they? Who aren’t they? What do they need? What would make them use your product over others?

Learning about your business

What are the business objectives? Who supports or provides the service? What do they need? How does information flow across the organisation?

Learning about your technology

What is your existing tech stack? What are your dependencies? How are your teams organised? What is your path to live?

We start by identifying what you know already and then use the gaps, risks, and assumptions to inform what we need to dig into further. We keep our research lean, and do just enough to either fail fast, or increase our speed-to-market. We also favour speaking to real people, no matter how difficult they can be to access. There is no substitute to gathering insights directly from the people who use or support your product.

Activities might include:

• Desk research
• User interviews
• Stakeholder interviews and workshops
• Surveys
• Shadowing
• Diary studies
• Business process analysis
• Data analysis
• Market research

To do this we use a range of sense-making and framing techniques. The outputs of these activities will allow us to share and engage our insights with a broad range of stakeholders, but also act as the starting point for ideating solutions.

Outputs might include:

• Insights
• Themes
• Opportunities
• Personas or archetypes
• User needs
• Jobs-to-be-done
• User journey maps
• Service blueprints
• Technical architecture diagrams
• ‘How-might-we’ statements
• Problem statement
• Hypotheses

We can’t (and shouldn’t) try to solve everything in the discovery phase, so we pick our biggest assumptions, risks and opportunities, to start with. To achieve this, we combine our problem definitions with techniques such as opportunity tree mapping and impact/effort scales, to assess their priority.

Once we understand our priorities, then the team focuses on creating as many solutions as possible in the shortest amount of time. We might be looking at the core value proposition itself, a key uses journey or service interaction, or a technical challenge.

We refine our ideas just enough to get feedback from either within your organisation or the target users, and assess which ideas are worth progressing.

Prototypes can be either user, business, or technically focussed. For example, we might create a visual prototype of a core product user journey and test it with real users. We might create a financial model to understand the volumes and investment needed to produce the desired business returns. Or we might build a technical proof-of-concept to test its feasibility and get a better understanding of the effort needed to build it.

We continue to iterate and refine our prototypes until the team has enough confidence that they are going to be successful, and to then plan for implementation.

Should the team and your business feel confident enough to move into delivery, then the team will begin to focus its efforts on planning and preparation. This will involve defining the scope of a Minimal Viable Product, creating a high-level backlog and roadmap, and elaborating the first few sprints worth of user stories.

We work with you to help understand the team and investment required for a delivery phase, and will include our recommendations as part of an end-of-discovery playback.