The process of understanding customers’ needs and the business environment to develop a product is known as “product discovery.” It helps the development team choose a product’s characteristics and guarantees that the right product is developed for the right client. It’s not easy for product managers. They are expected to guide the development team to deliver items that customers like, fulfil the company’s strategic goals, meet the needs of sales teams, and guarantee that the team is motivated and effective.Â
Product managers are under more pressure now that free of charge, free trials and product-led growth have emerged. A product manager nowadays must handle these difficulties and create goods that perfectly meet market demands by using a more complex and modern approach to product discovery.
Product Discovery Jira
Jira Product Discovery is a unique tool designed to help product teams communicate with engineering and business teams, prioritise ideas, and bring everyone together. Jira Product Discovery supports the transformation of product management into a collaborative activity. It gives product teams the ability to work together toward a common goal to develop products that affect your clients and company. Product teams can use Jira Product Discovery to:
- Create meaning out of chaos by patiently obtaining, classifying, and ranking ideas and insights.
- Use tools like roadmaps and customisable views to interact and communicate with stakeholders constantly.
- Jira Product Discovery has been built into Jira to help you connect product ideas to Jira development work, bridging the gap between your tech and business teams.
Core Product Discovery Techniques
Here are important strategies that any team should use to get started with their product discovery process.
1. Frame the problem
A key component of product discovery is precisely identifying the issue or opportunity that your solution will solve. This involves communicating with team members and stakeholders to fully understand the problem.Â
Your team should provide a concise and clear description of the problem, including its size and impact. Making a problem statement lays the foundation for successful problem-solving by defining the issue at hand and helping to get all parties involved on the same page.
2. User research
Using techniques like surveys and interviews to interact with actual people can help you identify the most urgent problems that your product has to address. The goal of user research is to actively understand users’ needs and behaviours to generate ideas and reveal insights.
The team may better understand its audience, get useful knowledge, and create a solution that solves actual user problems by presenting the appropriate product discovery questions to consumers or targeted audiences.
3. Competitive analysis
Examine the market to find trends, rivals, and openings. Your team may strategically differentiate from competitors’ products, make well-informed judgments, and place your product in the market by collecting data on industry developments and checking competitors.
Many teams will conduct usability tests on competitors’ goods as part of their competitive analysis to figure out which features and functions are lacking or create user friction. It helps the group identify areas where their design could be improved.
4. Brainstorming
Team members collaborate to come up with several original concepts and solutions during brainstorming. There are many different methods or techniques for brainstorming. Teams will frequently set a timer, write down as many answers to the issue statement as they can, and then vote on the solutions to see which ones work best.
5. Prototype testing
The first stage in testing your ideas on actual people is to create limited viable products (MVPS), often known as low-fidelity prototypes. Your team develops an interactive version of the experience or product you have in mind during this phase.Â
The objective is to see how users react to something concrete so you can determine if the concept is on the correct track. This lessens the chance of making a significant investment in a solution that could not satisfy user needs.
Know About Product Discovery Framework
A careful technique that product teams could use in the early phases of product research and development is the product discovery framework. Frameworks enable us to generate several ideas and possible solutions by helping us identify the target market and the issue that our product is intended to address. The following are the top frameworks for product discovery that your team can use.
Design thinking
Design thinking is a broad profession, but here are five stages to use it in the product discovery process:
Empathize
This stage is about placing yourself in your users’ situations in order to better understand their requirements and connect with them.
Define
Following detailed user research, it’s time to specify the issue you wish to solve.
Ideate
During this stage, product teams are urged to come up with as many ideas as they can and create every potential solution to the issue that was previously identified. The objective is to let your imagination run wild and think creatively without worrying about the viability of your ideas.
Prototype
The group examines each concept individually to determine its viability and ability to be constructed. Developing prototypes that could address the issue is the aim of this stage.
Test
It’s time to put the prototype to the test and get as much input from users as you can. Does it make their issues go away? Is it simple to use? Is there something missing?
Impact mapping
When creating a prototype, impact mapping can help you in deciding which features should be prioritised. There are six stages you can go through:
- Goal
Always begin with a why. What is the goal of your product, why are you creating it, and what issue do you want to resolve?
- Actors
Identify your target audience.
- Impact
Determine the potential benefit or impact that your user may experience from resolving each issue. Will it help them get closer to their objective? In what way would it help them? What would the difference be?
- Deliverables
Specify deliverables that will allow you to achieve the intended effect. This is where you specify the precise features and improvements you wish to make, to put it another way.
- Priorities
Evaluate each feature’s possible impact, risk of practicality, and effort needed to develop it. Give top priority to features that offer your users the most value.
Opportunity Solution Trees
Using an Opportunity Solution Tree as a method for product discovery helps you get over barriers by showing the connection between three important components:
- Outcome
- Opportunities
- Solutions
Determine the intended result first, such as raising customer lifetime value. Next, find possibilities that fit that business goal. All of your clients’ issues, difficulties, and pain points can be turned into chances for development.
Jobs To Be Done (JTBD)
This theory is predicated on the idea that consumers purchase goods to “hire” them to perform particular tasks for them. An individual can examine prospective features from the perspective of jobs or actions that products must perform, rather than from the demands and viewpoint of customers.Â
They can question, “What is required to successfully and effortlessly complete this task?” rather than, “What do our customers need?” The Jobs To Be Done framework can be implemented in the following five steps:
- Market identification: Determine user personas and their pain issues to identify the market.
- Job identification: Determine the tasks and goals your user personas are hoping to achieve.
- Job categorisation: Organise the jobs into two categories, primary jobs and secondary jobs that are required to complete the primary ones.
- Job statement: Give a brief explanation of each task that must be completed.
- Setting priorities: Determine which tasks are the most important or urgent. When you begin developing the first version of your product using product backlog management, these are the features you should focus on first.
Objectives and Key Results (OKRS)
Your main aim can be broken down into smaller milestones, and a strategy can be developed by combining OKRS with other product discovery frameworks. Suppose you want to learn more about your users. You should now develop major results that will allow you to measure your progress.
Story Mapping
A technique for product discovery called story mapping lets you illustrate how users interact with your software. It works well for complicated products, products with several personas, or focus groups with potentially different objectives and behaviours.Â
It allows you to prioritise important features, track their movements throughout the app, and find possible feature requests from various user groups. Product teams can involve stakeholders and other team members by using this model.
- Develop your personas, learn about user wants, and gain an understanding of your customers.
- Describe the objectives they hope to achieve with your product.
- Create user stories and map the user journey, the steps a user must take to accomplish a goal, from registering to making an online purchase through your app.
- Set the most important tasks first.
- Describe your minimum viable product, or MVP. Later on, you can add more features.
Dual-track agile
This strategy is perfect for businesses that prioritize ongoing research & development and use an agile roadmap. Without investing a lot of money, it allows you to have regular releases and continuous incremental improvements. The delivery track and the discovery track are two parallel tracks that operate concurrently.
Traditional product discovery activities, such as user and solution research, concept generation, and validation, are the main focus of the discovery track. If you want the product team and other stakeholders to collaborate on product management operations and maintain a continuous learning loop, you should use dual-track agile.
Lean startup
The lean startup framework seeks to quickly determine whether a product can be produced to reduce the product development cycle and save time and money. Its main goal is to remove all elements that are not necessary to create a minimal viable product (MVP). The framework can be used in four steps:
- Understanding
Learning more about the user and understanding the primary issue from their point of view are the objectives of this phase.
- Idea generation
You should generate all of the concepts that could be used to solve the issue. Then, pick the ones that are straightforward and easy to put into practice, and that address the problem the best.
- Prototyping
Create an MVP with only the most important functionality to help early adopters in resolving their issues. But make sure the end user will find enough value in your prototype.
- Validating
Test your MPV to see whether it addresses client issues and gather feedback from users to help you improve the product’s next iteration.
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Product Discovery FAQs
Q1- What is the purpose of product discovery?
Ans- Product discovery is the process of understanding the needs of customers and the business environment to develop a product. It helps product teams in choosing a product's characteristics and guarantees that the correct product is developed for the right client.
Q2- What are the elements of product discovery?
Ans - An efficient product discovery process includes the following five essential components: discover and understand the user's identity and challenges. Determine which of those problems your product will address. Prioritise your tasks and formulate a hypothesis.
Q3- What is the value of product discovery?
Ans - Product discovery benefits the product team, the business (by avoiding wasting money on unproductive ideas and unpopular goods), and customers by providing them with something they might very well consider important.
Q4- What is the aim of discovery?
Ans- Learning about an issue or opportunity before creating solutions is the aim of discovery. The process of discovery involves gathering data from many sources and techniques to assess whether an opportunity merits further exploration or whether an issue is worth addressing.
Q5- Who leads product discovery?
Ans- Depending on the kinds of decisions they are making, the product team should bring in different team members. Product discovery is led by a product trio, which is usually made up of a software engineer, a designer, and a product manager.
