Product Discovery Guide 2.0
How to drop bad ideas fast enough
Stop asking how you can accelerate delivery.
Start asking how fast you can drop bad ideas.
Shall we explore that?
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Free: Product Discovery journey overview (4 minutes reading)
Premium: Detailed product discovery guide (28 minutes reading)
Let’s get straight into it because I value your time!
Discovering what creates value requires an open mind and the courage to drop bad ideas quickly. You might be familiar with the challenges of dangerous biases and adverse effects on discovery, leading to biased product discovery. Yet, we should clarify how to apply mindful product discovery and escape from biased discovery.
This episode will explore how a discovery journey enables you to drop bad ideas fast enough and uncover value drivers.
Understanding the Discovery Journey
My first contact with product discovery left me over-optimistic. I thought we could repeat specific steps and consistently achieve success. But then I tried that and had to swallow a bitter taste of failure.
Understanding why a strict discovery process wouldn’t work took me a while. My conclusion came out of the blue. A lightbulb popped up in my head while driving from Munich to Vienna with my wife to celebrate our second wedding anniversary.
We planned to get to Vienna by early afternoon, but some unpredictable roadblocks forced us to change our way, and then a heavy rain made us stop in Salzburg by lunchtime. Unexpectedly, we had one of the best Italian lunches of our lives. This unplanned lunch made the journey more romantic, and we didn’t care about arriving in Vienna several hours later. Then, I concluded what product discovery is: it’s about the journey and not the plan.
When you start a discovery journey, you set a goal, serving as your north star. Then, you learn as much as possible from your customers and strive to uncover the value drivers that could get you closer to your goal. You’ll potentially have more options than capacity, so you prioritize, identify assumptions, test the critical ones, run experiments, and reimagine the future. Like a road trip, it’s about the journey, and you’re the driver. You can decide whether to drive forward or backward or detour if necessary.
I’d love to give you a magic process to ensure you’ll create value at the speed of light, but I don’t allow myself to fool you. I will share the elements for a valuable discovery journey and help you understand what they enable you to achieve.
As the driver, you will use your judgment to decide what to do, when, and for how long.
See the discovery journey in the following image:
You may think: “This is a waterfall approach.” The biggest difference with the discovery journey is that you don’t get stuck with phases. You can always go back and forth as much as necessary. You continuously search for value drivers and reserve the right to drop bad ideas whenever you identify them.
Let’s explore each element in-depth.
Clarify the Goal: Know What Success Looks Like
When you have outcome-oriented roadmaps, applying product discovery is simple. You pick one item from your roadmap and continue with your discovery journey. Yet, life tends to be more complicated than that. You may end up in a situation where you lack a roadmap or you have an output-oriented one. That means you’ve got to step back and clarify the goal you ought to achieve.
Having clarity on the goal is critical. Otherwise, you’ll end up discussing every opportunity. Ultimately, discussing much and getting little done. Yet a poor definition of goals won’t make your life easier either. Let’s look at some usual definitions:
Increase growth by 30%
Decrease return rate by 20%
Increase basket size by 15%
Decrease churn rate by 20%
How does the above help you accelerate decisions?
Sadly, not a lot. They don’t give you everything you need to play the game. Increasing growth tells you what to reach but not what you could sacrifice and what not to. Without knowing the other side of the coin, endless discussions will drain your energy.
When I worked for a car dealer startup, the CEO wanted me to increase the conversion rate by 30% in three months. I didn’t know which trade-offs I could make, so I went to the CEO and asked him some questions.
What can I use to increase the conversion rate? He promptly answered, “You can drive costs up. We don’t need to be profitable now; we must prove market fit.”
What’s something we cannot sacrifice? Another easy question for the CEO. “We got too many car dealers leaving us. We cannot afford to make it worse.”
After this exchange, I had a high-level goal: “Without impacting retention, increase conversion rate by 30% even if that hurts profitability.” The CEO promptly agreed and said the ultimate goal is to enable car dealers to get the vehicles they want while helping owners get a fair offer. As I clarified our constraints, we simplified decision-making, allowing us to find value drivers.
It’s uncommon to talk about potential trade-offs to reach a goal. The typical scenario is to focus on outputs, but even when companies move to outcomes, they often ignore trade-offs.
You’ll face resistance once you try my recommended approach. Business stakeholders will claim they are unwilling to sacrifice anything to drive desired outcomes. I’d suggest not approaching them with empty hands but bringing a trade-off that accelerates progress.
For example, as you understand your audience, you’ll eventually uncover tremendous chances to drive value, but they will have side effects. Share them with business stakeholders. Collaborate and find compromises when necessary.
When you face biased discovery, stakeholders will push you to commit to features, which becomes the goal as they’ve already fallen in love with them. To move to mindful product discovery, you need to help your stakeholders step back. Get them to share what they want to achieve with their requests so you know the goal you need to pursue.
Alignment on what success means is vital. Without that, confusion takes over, and getting stuck is your punishment.
Understand Your Audience: Know How Customers Use Your Product
How do customers interact with your product?