Got a new product idea?
Well, brace yourself to take the next step.
But, do you think having an idea for a new product or new feature is sufficient for you to start working on its development with your design and tech team? What you need is detailed research of your idea to get your foot in the door of the market which will make the customers accept your product. The reality of business is harsh. Insufficient research might take you down the hill.
Learning new approaches to steer is a crucial part of the thorough research that you do for a new product idea or a new feature. What matters is how early you accept the new findings through research and tailor them according to the needs of the end-users.
Have you considered these points while researching your idea?
These essential points will turn your idea into a fully-fledged business and make you stand out in the market. Understanding the customer and aligning your product with their needs helps you in building the product that customers will love.
Would you like to take a minute to reconsider if you are on a classic path of product development? Usually, you get an idea, you share it with different teams and begin designing the product, and the tech team builds it. You market the product and started selling it. But, you might get disappointed as sales might not be as what you had in mind. Why did this happen? The answer is very simple- you might have not done enough research on your customers’ needs before building it. That’s why it’s essential to do thorough market research before your design and tech team starts building the product.
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An effective Product Discovery always includes customer requirements in the entire process of product development. In developing the product, the decisions taken by the product founder or the product manager should be based on experiments or data acquired from customer feedback. Empathizing with the customers always helps in knowing their pain points and goals which drives your product in the right direction with validated results. Take a look at some points where product discovery helps:
A strategy is a detailed plan of your product journey. It will provide an answer to what your customers’ needs are and what features to build so that it provides maximum benefits to your customers. Product Discovery makes your strategy concrete by helping you know your customers and how you can provide better services to them, drives your product on the right path of development, and helps you find the best value for your product.
Identifying the customer’s needs is important for any business to thrive. They are usually the unmet needs of the users who come across your business or the competitors or when the users are searching for solutions for their needs. You can do that by thorough user research or by contacting them through social media. The whole cyclical process of anticipating, identifying, and meeting the customers’ needs will make your product and business successful.
The “right” product is always innovative from a technical perspective and user-centric from a customer perspective for it to be the market fit. Researching your product idea, making the key strategy, deciding the features by conducting experiments, and validating them will help you build the right product in the right way.
The value of a product can be time and cost for the customers but revenue made for the organizations. One of the common but concrete and significant approaches to estimating the value of the product can be in terms of benefits and cost but this is entirely for your business. It can also be done by measuring the market position of your product against your competitors, utility, or customers’ attention towards your product.
According to the internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and coach, Teresa Torres, product discovery is a continuous process. It is not executed at a specific duration of the product journey or just once during the research process but is an integral part of the overall development of the product and even after its launch. It’s a process of gathering information about your product and evaluating them in the context of the market and target customers.
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“Product Discovery describes the work that we carry out while taking the decisions on what we are going to build.”
You need to weigh every aspect and measure your product from different angles before the product goes through the development process. The key point in product discovery is to include your customers in every decision of product development.
A good product is always evolving, with time, technology, and, most importantly, responding to users’ needs. For a rapidly evolving product, product managers and product leaders are constantly debating what to build, how to solve user problems, which problems to prioritize, and how to deliver value quickly. And to do so efficiently, they need to think out of the box and adopt customer-centered thinking. There are quite a few frameworks and/or processes that help teams adopt this approach and therefore keep discovering and rediscovering their products. User interviews, surveys, usability tests, A/B tests, assumption tests, customer journey mapping, story mapping, OKRs, impact mapping, jobs-to-be-done, etc are some popular frameworks that deepen product discovery.
When any product is to be built, there are always risks in taking product decisions as a lot of resources are involved in it. What are the features that are to be built with limited resources? Is the product easily accessible to the customers? Is the product used by every segment of the target customers in the market? Product discovery provides answers to these questions with which we can minimize the loss of resources. Let’s look at some of the common phases in product discovery
For a product to turn into a successful business, you need a clear vision. A vision is formed by keeping the customer’s needs in the center along with the future of the product in the long run. Knowing your target audience and understanding their jobs and expectations gives you a rough sketch of your customers’ feedback towards the product.
Defining the problem that your business, product, or service is going to solve will be your problem discovery.
A new product idea might not work if you don’t have a proper plan or lack financial support, but it will fail if you don’t know the ‘why’ behind your product. Addressing the issues or problems of the target market will help you in finding the right answer. Consider the following questions:
When you find answers to these questions, you will be able to list the problems and needs of your customers which will help in building the product that will be accepted by your target audience.
At this stage, you find the solution that fits the best to the listed problems of your customers. Through the process of experimentation, you can design and validate the different features that your best solution will offer to customers. You can consider the following questions in finding the correct solutions:
With this process, you can validate your previous experiments along with the customers’ requirements for the first version of your product. Further, you can define your value proposition with a proposed solution to the core problems of your customers.
You want reliable and relevant information about your customers, market, and competition. This detailed information will ensure that your product outline is based on metrics and reality rather than your gut feeling. You can also find the answers to:
1. Customer Journey
2. Demographics of target customers
3. Who are the competitors?
4. What are the competitors doing?
5. Which customer segment is buying your competitors’ products?
Before moving forward with the product, you need to make sure that you have all the information about the market and the customers so that you can make accurate decisions to market your product.
A product’s success depends on the well-thought design of the solution to a customer’s problems. It provides clarity to product teams and stakeholders on how the product will perform in the market. It will not be shocking if your product design doesn’t satisfy everyone at once. You always have the option to iterate with which you can make your product a market fit. Product designers should always be aware of the market trend, what’s in need, and what’s not.
Innovation and stability are the two important parts of scaling in the product development process. You need to find the most effective way to capitalize on your product to penetrate the market.
It is very important to understand the user’s needs and discover the answers to the ‘why’ and ‘what’ of their problems. You are trying to build a new product or new feature for your customers’ unresolved problems that can relieve their pains. So before executing your plans, you should collect sufficient insights about your customers and their problems, and study them from different angles about what they need and what their expectations are.
After developing an initial understanding of the necessities and difficulties that the customers are facing, it’s time to create the best solutions that will provide maximum benefit to them. You should involve different teams in the ideation as you will get more ideas to look at the product from different angles. This ideation process in product discovery makes the team think bigger about the product and its success.
You have a list of ideas that can solve your customers’ problems. But, will the customers provide feedback on a bunch of ideas? For this, you need a prototype of the product which can be easily accessed by the customers. You don’t need detailed graphics and various features in your prototype to test the hypothesis that you may have from ideation. What’s more important is the honest feedback from the customers who are consistently making use of your product.
To test the relevance of the discovery ideas that you have collected, you need to conduct experiments. Before jumping directly into the experimental procedure, you should have a clear understanding of the assumptions made so that you could choose the appropriate procedure for the experiments.
You have a handful of ideas that you obtained after experimenting. But there must be some ideas that will have less priority. These validated ideas are needed to be refined and separated from the good ones to the ones which will provide you with real business and are aligned with your business goals.
When you start ideating to build a new product or a new feature for your product, it’s because you want to find a solution to the problem faced by yourself or some users that you must have come across. Product Discovery helps you in validating those ideas and gives you a better understanding of the end-users through the process.
If you are about to develop a new feature for your product, you will need to know the difficulties of the users with the current product, their needs, and what were the situations for them to require a new iteration of the product. This will help you prioritize the ideas that will help you build the features you should launch next.
If you are about to build a new product altogether, you will need thorough research with different ideation processes. Having no information on the users and their personas will pose a difficulty in the initial development process. But doing in-depth research on different users of different segments and thereby forming a behavioral pattern on their needs and pain points will help in building the right product with impactful features for the right target audience.
What’s your new idea about- a new feature for your product or a new product altogether? Would you like to share your process of Product Discovery?
