Product Discovery Health Check & Checklist
Product Discovery Health Check & Checklist
How to ensure your discovery practices don't go broken
Creating features nobody uses isn’t why product teams exist. Yet, that happens too often.
If the CEO wants something, then that becomes the priority.
Sales promise something, and then the team has to deliver it.
An influential stakeholder has an insight, and then that becomes the direction.
What about what customers truly need?
Well, that’s a conversation often forgotten. We all get too busy juggling multiple things that distract us from creating what truly matters. Yet, it shouldn’t be that way. The key out of this mass is called product discovery.
Product discovery done right helps you understand when you’re wrong fast enough.
Let’s take this premium Untrapping Product Teams episode to explore how you can understand whether your product discovery is set to fly or trap you. Here’s what to expect:
All subscribers: Product discovery health check (7 minutes reading time)
Premium subscribers: Detailed product discovery checklist (15 minutes reading time)
Before we get into the details, I recently launched a self-paced Product Discovery video course that resonated with people worldwide. Join us if you want to step up your game and learn how to drive value when everyone distracts you.
Product Discovery Health Check
How do you know if your product discovery practices are equipping you to thrive or blocking you from creating value? Let’s start with questions:
Are your weekly customer interviews insightful or nonexistent?
Do you identify assumptions or ignore them?
Do you test critical assumptions regularly, or not at all?
Do you explore multiple solutions or commit to the first one?
The more your answers are to the right, the harder it becomes to drop bad ideas fast enough. Shall we change it?
Let’s explore each element.
1. Value Proposition
Everything is arguably a priority without knowing what your offer is for whom.
One of the most common traps I see involves excessive discussion about work instead of doing the work itself. This happens when teams lack clarity on what matters and what doesn’t.
A value proposition can help you understand what to do and what not to do.
Here are a few good examples:
Dropbox: "Simplify your work.”
Dropbox synchronizes all your files across devices, making them accessible anytime, anywhere. It also offers easy sharing and collaboration features to enhance productivity.
Canva: "Design anything, publish anywhere.”
With thousands of templates and easy-to-use tools, Canva empowers you to create outstanding visuals for all your creative needs.
Slack: "Bring your team together, wherever you are.”
Slack’s channels, messaging, and integrations make communicating and collaborating easy, reducing the need for endless emails and meetings.
When your value proposition is clear, you can challenge opportunities by asking, “How does this help us with our value proposition?” Product management is often about filtering out ideas that are distracting from your objectives.
2. Customer Interviews
In her book Continuous Discovery Habits, Teresa Torres recommends that product teams interview customers weekly. I massively agree with that. What you get from interviews also defines how much you can innovate.
First, get in the habit of interviewing customers often. Then, ensure you uncover value drivers. Let’s have a look at what bad interviews results:
Confirmation that your solution is right
Verbal confirmation customers want to buy your solution
Validation of what you believed to be the right thing to do
The above is an illusion that you’re progressing in the right direction. Yet, what you genuinely want to get from interviews is different. Let’s look into that:
Understanding of current struggles customers have
Learning from real stories about jobs you want to solve
Uncovering unknowns so you can benefit
The above helps you innovate, while the previous one ensures you stay stuck with your bias. Product discovery is about understanding context before you craft solutions.
The following image gives you a few insights on how to run customer interviews well:
To run solid interviews, you can use my templates:
3. Identifying Assumptions
We all have beliefs that we lack evidence supporting. Yet, letting our beliefs drive product decisions is a poor choice because you rely on luck to succeed.
A better approach is to name what we believe will happen and evaluate the evidence supporting it. Assumptions relate to five categories:
Desirability: Customers want your solution
Viability: Business benefit from it
Feasibility: You’ve got the necessary skills to build it
Usability: Users will understand how to benefit from it
Integrity: Your solution would do good for those involved
The more you ignore assumptions, the riskier your solution becomes.
A friend of mine, Marion Huwatscheck, says, “Assumptions are the mother of all fuck-ups.” This statement is strong, but it’s true. Tracking back, most of my failures relate to something I assumed to know, which later reality proved me wrong.
4. Testing Assumptions
Naming assumptions is the first step toward success, but that’s not enough. You need to confront reality to decide based on evidence, not opinions.
A crucial aspect of testing assumptions is prioritizing key critical business while ignoring all the others. You read it right. You don’t need to test all assumptions.
Business critical assumptions have two characteristics:
When proven wrong, your idea becomes obsolete
You lack evidence justifying investment
All the assumptions matching this critical require testing, while you can ignore the others.
To prioritize assumptions, you can use an assumption matrix created by David J. Bland, author of Testing Business Idea. I created a Miro board template to make your life easier.
5. Ideation
When you choose a problem to solve, what do you do next?
Do you define a solution and go all-in, or do you define a few options and explore which one better solves the problem?
From my experience, most teams focus on the left side, leading to confirmation bias and commitment escalation, which is a dangerous combination.
It’s hard to work on multiple solutions; management will not support that easily as they perceive it as a waste of money. Why would you work on multiple solutions if you only need one? That’s legitimate. Yet, you need one solution that works, and chances are pretty high that you will miss the mark by focusing on one solution.
Great product teams strive to ideate and come up with multiple solutions for the same problem. Unlike most teams, they commit to exploring at least two solutions and comparing the results they yield. Now, let’s clarify a few key things:
First, you build to learn, then to scale
Solutions that don’t drive desired results are good to go
Strive to run experiments to test the efficacy of your solution
Scale the reach gradually
The first experiments should run in days, not weeks
Decide how to progress based on evidence, not opinions
Product Discovery Check List
We started this post with a health check because it helps you understand the big picture of product discovery. What health check doesn’t give you is the answer to what is crucial to running product discovery.
Let me give you my Product Discovery Checklist, so you understand what you need to bring to the game to thrive.
Ten elements to rock it!