Why do a product discovery phase?
Summary
First, be aware that a user need can be solved by different solutions that may have more or less impact, and bring different business value to his organization.
The first reflex that we still too often notice is to start from the outset on a solution when we could question the relevance of the latter. So we prefer to carry out what we call a Discovery phase which allows us to go back to the origin of the need and the problem encountered by our users.
From this need we are able to formulate and study possible solutions which remain at the hypothesis stage, and which will be analyzed and tested to finally select the best one.
A good practice for carrying out a quality Discovery is to confront your users, whoever they are. For this nothing better than an empirical study, which is called in product jargon, a phase of user research.
Here are three tips to ensure your Discovery prey is truly user-centric:
- Go to the field to observe and analyze the behavior of your users but also to discuss with them. This will allow you to understand the elements to keep or modify in order to create a product that they consider essential and easy to use. We must therefore insist on ergonomics and fluidity a good product is a product whose use is clearly intuitive
- It is necessary to reproduce this phase of ethnological analysis several times to avoid shortcuts or to be fooled by your own means because, obviously, we all have them.
- If your product is live, test it in real conditions to measure usage deviations, its impact on users, and collect issues that will always be relevant. Be careful to measure the effort and impact of the changes you take and give to your product! The risk is to eventually generate more complexity than value and to move away from the need.
I hope these tips will be useful for you to initiate a phase of Product Discovery focused on user needs!
