Product Discovery: Advantages and who is responsible for it.

Table of contents:-

• What is Product Discovery?
• What are the advantages of Product Discovery?
• Is product discovery only applicable for new products?
• Who should be responsible for product discovery?

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What is Product Discovery?

Product discovery is the process of understanding customer needs and using that knowledge to build products and services that can solve their problems. The process is customer-centric and enables product teams to develop a feature or a product that can excel. 

The objective of Product Discovery is as follows:

• Acquire information about the problems that customers are facing.
• Take time and understand the customer problem at a deeper level. 
• Foster customer empathy to gain additional inputs.
• Gather feedback on the customer’s problems.
• Verify whether what you know of the customer so far is right. 
• Develop and prioritize features that cater to the customer’s problem.

What are the advantages of Product Discovery? 

• Aids to build useful products and services and improve the quality of the existing ones. 
• Provides a starting point to look for solutions to potential problems and make life easier. 
• Facilitates direct communication with the customers to understand their audience better. It gives a cultural benefit of adding value to work. 
• The perspective towards the roadmaps is changed to being “Blueprints” to solve customer problems. 
• Prevents wasting valuable resources such as labor, time, and money on unimportant aspects that the customers don’t want. 
• It delivers high-quality and customer-centric products or services that add value to the lives of lots of people.

Is product discovery only applicable for new products? 

No. Product Discovery can be used for both new products and existing products. It is usually used in the initial stages of product development. 

Product discovery can also be a continuous process by gathering customer insights at various junctures so as to keep improving the product in alignment with the needs of the customers. 

Carrying out product discovery with existing products need not be as complex as that in the initial stages of development. It can be a simple survey on a social media platform or a feedback form. 

Who should be responsible for product discovery? 

Product discovery is ideally a collaborative task for the whole team so that each member can learn from the feedback gathered and work accordingly. 

Product discovery can enable every team member to be on the same page and to collectively work towards the customer’s problem while fostering customer empathy. 

Here are the key pointers to consider when conducting a product discovery session and allotting responsibilities to various team members:

• The product owner
• The product manager
• The product designer
• The stakeholders