How important is Product discovery to your team and your product?

I have been recently working on a healthcare project and as the company was new to the software world, I was asked to first come up with a discovery approach that will help the project and specifically the product  to bear the fruits we were expecting it to bear. This was not the first time I designed a discovery approach that is appropriate to a company and their customers, however, everytime I design and run a discovery session, I learn new things and I get a new perspective on discovery.

For that reason, I have chosen to discuss this topic with you and share some of my learnings about the discovery process. Discovery is a very huge topic that can’t be discussed neither in one article nor one book. However, As it is our first time to discuss discovery in Product Management and software development, we will start by the basics like what is Discovery, why is it something to discuss.

Discovery is the process of closely understanding what your users' problems and needs are, then validating your ideas for solutions before starting development. The word “discovery” comes from the verb “To discover”, which means there is something that is not known and we want to discover it. The meaning of that word explains exactly why some teams don’t do discovery, it is because they think they know everything which is 100% wrong.

You might ask yourself what we are trying to discover especially in the software industry or startup world. There are so many known unknowns, things that we know that we don’t know. In startups and software industries we operate in too much uncertainty, which makes the industry one of the industries with too much risk to deal with. We are uncertain about who our customers are, what they need, their problems, the solutions we propose and other many risks. One of the best ways to mitigate those risks is discovery.

According to a McKinsey-Oxford study of 5400 ICT projects, 56% of IT projects deliver less value for the end user than planned initially. Let us today discuss why discovery is very important in terms of delivering value, which is the goal of every project, there is always that we want as an outcome. However, keep in mind that discovery serves the project in multiple ways, not only in value, but also in other areas that we will discuss in detail in our future discussions.

When a company or a team is working on a product, the goal is to provide value to customers. Value can be a problem solved, it can be time saved, it can be an opportunity or anything that our customers gain when they use our product. Then the question here would be, how do you know what your customers want? And that’s where discovery comes into play, the first key is to be customer centric.

Customer centricity 

If you are reading this article, the chance is that it is not your first time to see the term “customer centricity”, a lot of organizations and teams claim to be customer centric but only few of them are. I will borrow the definition of customer centricity from the Gartner glossary, where they defined it as  the ability of people in an organization to understand customers' situations, perceptions, and expectations.

To achieve customer centricity, customers need to be the focal point of all your decisions. That is why you cannot separate customer centricity and discovery. When you are customer centric, discovery becomes something that you do everyday, not just at the beginning of the project.

I have realized that sometimes, customers don’t even know exactly what they want as value, customers are always the masters of their problems, nobody understands their problems like themselves, however, when it comes to knowing what should be done for them to get value, it becomes your responsibility as a team to know what they need. It is one of the biggest and challenging tasks in this world to know what someone wants when even that person doesn’t know. The solution to that is simple and hard at the same time, its discovery.

Discovery is done in different ways by different product teams. However, the common denominator of all teams that get discovery right is that they are all obsessed with customers. They don’t interact with their customers once in a quarter, they do it frequently, some of them on a weekly basis. There is no shortcut to product discovery, you have to get out of the office and go talk and observe your customers.

The billionaire and Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos said that the number 1 that has made Amazon successful by far is the obsessive compulsive focus on customers. This has been the key to so many unicorns in the world. However you might ask yourself why do we still have teams and companies that don’t do discovery?  In your company or team, on that product that you are working on or plan to work on, is discovery something you take seriously or it is a nice to have but not a must have to your team?

You will never know what users want or need without obsessively interacting with them. If you are someone whose customers tell you that they want an “x” feature and you go and build it, I want to let you know that you are far from delivering value.

Today’s article was to let you know the importance of discovery especially when it comes to value and to ask you how important is discovery to your team, share with me what you think about discovery and what you would like to know about discovery. In my next articles I will dive deep into continuous discovery and different techniques to conduct discovery and get the best out of it.