Product
discovery

Reduce the risk of building the wrong product by getting under the skin of your users and rapidly testing solutions to their problems.

Duration: 4-12 weeks

Team: 3-5 people

A product discovery phase helps teams identify solutions that are worth building by delving into real user problems and refining high-level solutions through prototyping and user testing. While product discovery should continue throughout the development lifecycle, it’s important to dedicate time and focus towards it in the early stages. This reduces the risk of developing a product that might not be valuable users, feasible to build, or viable to run. We help avoid these potential pitfalls by following a tried-and-tested, collaborative and evidence-based approach.

  • Build a deep understanding of your users
  • Reduce uncertainty, risk, and development costs
  • Gain confidence in a solution before building it
  • Build products that are valuable, feasible, viable and usable
  • Prepare your team to move into delivery
  • Get to market faster

Step-by-step

1. Align

The first step is to quickly align the team by building a shared understanding and collective sense of purpose through facilitated workshops.

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

2. Understand the problem

You can’t build a product that people love, if you don’t understand the people who you’re building it for.

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

3. Define the problem

Once we’ve gathered as much information about your users, business, and technology as possible, we turn our attention towards making it useful.

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

4. Ideate

We begin ideating by identifying which are the most pressing challenges we need to tackle.

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.

5. Prototype

With a narrowed shortlist of ideas, we then begin to create prototypes to evaluate their user value, commercial viability, technical feasibility, and usability, in more detail.

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.

6. Plan

Finally, a decision must be made whether to progress into the delivery phase, to stop altogether, or to pivot, based on what we’ve learned during product discovery.

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.

Key outputs

  • Research and analysis outputs and insights
  • Personas, user journeys, service blueprints
  • Screen designs, usability prototypes, technical proof-of-concepts
  • High-level technical solution architecture
  • High-level backlog
  • High-level roadmap
  • End-of-discovery presentation

How we work with you

Agile

We favour responding to change over following a plan. We use backlogs and task boards to manage our work and run 2-week sprints, with regular ceremonies for communication, planning, and reviewing our progress.

Collaborative

Our mission is your mission. We work transparently and inclusively with your organisation and your suppliers to co-create your product strategy.

Lean

We deploy a lightweight, highly experienced team and take a ‘just-enough’ approach to research and analysis. This helps us make decisions quickly, accelerate time-to-market, and acknowledges the need for future iteration.

Avoid building the wrong thing

Do you need help discovering your next great product or major feature? Book a call with one of our team today.

Book a call today