What is discovery and why aren't more people doing it?
Disovery
Discovery is a vital part of the product development process. Discovery enables a product team to test its assumptions and reveal underlying needs, problems, behaviours and potential methods to address these, before committing to a particular path or solution.
Discovery is often under-utilised or disregarded by product teams, usually because speed is prized over research and testing. This misunderstanding of Mark Zuckerberg’s famous motto to “move fast and break things tends to result in poor problem-solution fit, and in turn poor product-market fit.
Sometimes, empathy is the enemy, with the product manager believing they are a good proxy for the customer without ever validating this viewpoint. The resulting disconnect can have severe consequences. The most famous example is probably Kodak failing to take advantage of the digital photography technology it helped to pioneer. Kodak’s inability to see the market shifts that were happening as people moved to digital cameras, and then on to social media and phones, led to the company falling from a dominant position in film processing and development to filing for bankruptcy in 2012.
If You Build It, They Won't Come
In a world of information overload, the chances of someone happening upon your product are vanishingly small. You need to cultivate your customers, particularly in the early days, ensuring that you are close to them and that you truly understand their needs and problems. In short, you need to do discovery.
The need is no less great as you grow. If you’re lucky enough to cross the chasm from early adoption to broader market approval, you need to continuously discover the problems that your customers will pay you to solve, and help them to discover your solution.
What Is Discovery Anyway?
When people on product teams talk about discovery, they usually refer to product discovery. However, there are three types of discovery, all of which must work in concert for a product to find its market and effectively sole customer problems.
- Product Discovery: researching user and customer needs, problems and behaviours
- Customer Discovery: “finding out who the customers for your product are and whether the problem you are solving is important to them” – Steve Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany. In other words, have you found a problem that people will pay you to solve, and is your solution one they will pay for?
- Technical Discovery: considering and testing various technical solutions to support the product requirements. How efficiently can you solve the problem?
Let's look at each of these in a little more detail.
Product Discovery
The product and its supporting hypotheses should be defined by the Product Development team. Product discovery attempts to answer the following questions:
- What problem is your product attempting to solve?
- How might our product solve customer problems?
Product discovery can take many forms, including user research, A/B testing, interviews, focus groups, etc.
Customer Discovery
The difference between product and customer discovery is one of focus, as both need to happen in concert for a product to be successful. Customer discovery is understanding the needs, behaviours and pain points of a particular customer segment, who will form the target market for your product.
You shouldn’t assume that product discovery will also help you identify your market niche or approach. These are two separate but related activities.
Product Discovery and Customer Discovery enable us to understand whether our product has identified a problem worth solving and how likely customers are to use our product to solve that problem. These types of discovery enable you to:
- Identify your customers and your users (especially important where these are not the same, as is often the case in B2B)
- Surface the high-value problems your customers have
- Learn how your product solves these problems
Technical Discovery
The third form of discovery is informed by the other two. When you have identified a problem worth solving, what are the technical choices you can make to power your solution? What are the architectural trade-offs you are willing to make? For example, when you are creating an early iteration of a product, you may not need to worry about scalability, but this will become a concern as you move toward mass adoption. When you make the necessary technical choices and optimise your investment are critical to your success. Technical discovery should be done in concert with the other discovery activities to avoid premature optimisation.
A good example of technical discovery helped drive Facebook’s eventual dominance over MySpace in social media. Observing the move toward mobile, Facebook invested heavily in its mobile app, giving users the same great experience on all devices. MySpace was slower to invest in mobile, and this was one of the factors that led to its loss of market share to Facebook.
The Four Big Risks
If you think about product development from the perspective of the Silicon Valley Product Group’s four big risks, we can see that discovery is fundamental to addressing theses:
- Feasibility – technical discovery enables us to decide whether it’s possible for us to create our solution.
- Viability – technical discovery enables us to figure out how we can produce our solution at a cost that will enable us to sell to our customers at a profit
- Usability – Product discovery drives us to ensure that customers will not struggle with the product, ensuring that we limit our usability risk
- Value – Customer discovery ensures that there are enough customers who will receive sufficient value from the product to pay for our solution.
Conclusion
Teams will often discount the importance of discovery, over-estimating their ability to think like customers, or prizing speed of development over research. However, failing to do adequate discovery exposes the product team to an unsustainable amount of risk as they lose sight of the customers they are delivering for, and the market they are trying to sell into.