Day 6 - Product Discovery
Validating things before building them...
Hello learners! Welcome to the sixth lesson in the series 30 Days of PM by Crework! Today, we will be talking about how to discover products that your users love.
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Remember Day 4 - Product Thinking? Yeah, we are gonna talk about something related to that.
So, in product thinking, we said that we first need to understand user motivation and their needs well before we start building things, and then come up with a solution and turn it into a product.
But, is it that easy? If you understand your users well and build something, would it always work? Maybe it will work, maybe it will not. But, how should we increase the probability of us being right?
Here comes Product Discovery as a concept.
What’s Product Discovery?
In short, product discovery is a process that helps product teams refine their ideas by deeply understanding real user problems and then landing on the best way to solve them.
This might sound similar to product thinking only, but there’s a difference. Product Thinking is a way of thinking about the whole product, it’s a framework. Product Discovery is a whole process that you do to come up with final solution backed by data. In a way, product discovery is a part of product thinking.
The standard process for prioritizing what the delivery team works on looks like this:
What if we invested more in researching and validating ideas upfront before we ever sent them to delivery?
What does this image really mean?
Look at this smaller loop inside the bigger loop. This smaller loop is the product discovery process.
In product discovery, you try to understand your user well, then come up with solutions, and then validate those solutions fast. This validation part tells you a lot about how good your solution was and what kind of changes you can do to the product before really launching it to all the users.
As Marty Cagan says - “First, you need to discover whether there are real users out there that want this product… Second, you need to discover a product solution to this problem that is usable, useful, and feasible.”
Product Discovery happens in both. If you pitch an idea to the users and they don’t see themselves using it, they don’t want it. If you ship something and they don’t use it, they don’t want it.
And if you ship something, users try it, find it useful and give a lot of feedback, you will eventually reach a good product solution to the problem.
What are the Key Steps in the Product Discovery Process?
Step 1: Power up your customer empathy by understanding the underlying needs and feelings of customers. Create a complete picture of your customer by crowdsourcing different perspectives across your team.
Step 2: After you understand the user needs you are trying to address, you must then clearly define them. Aim to nail down one sentence that covers the entire problem you are trying to solve.
Step 3: Make sure that you are actually working on problems that need to be solved. How big is the pain that your users are experiencing? How much value will tackling the pain truly add?
Step 4: Figure out which of the identified problems you should tackle first and prioritize that.
Step 5: After you isolate specific user problems, it is best to reframe them into chunks that can be attainably solved. Then, you ideate to figure out how you plan to solve your users’ problems.
Step 6: You build a quick prototype for some of your users for whom you are solving this problem.
Step 7: Once done, you test your solution. Testing determines whether or not the proposed solutions are actually capable of solving the problem
Once these are done, you have something which you didn’t have before - results. The data from this whole experimentation gives you much more confidence in what should be built and what should be stopped right now.
Based on this data, you can take better decisions and launch products that the users actually need and hence increase your probability of building something useful.
Learn Product Thinking with us!
Tomorrow, we are organizing a session on Product Thinking where Sarthak Jain, Associate Product Manager at PhonePe will talk about Product Thinking and will solve a case study live to showcase how product thinking can be applied on a problem.
Want to attend? Register now: Click here
Day 6 - Done ✅
Congratulations on completing the sixth day of the series. 🥳 Just one day and you will be on a week long streak, you should be proud of yourself.
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