Recently, we had the opportunity to present at Product School in Chicago on our Product Discovery process. Product Discovery for us is very simply problem identification and validation. The way that we conduct Product Discovery is also a process to build empathy for our customers across our teams, build context to understand the problems of our customers and understand the market in which we operate.
Everyday at From Popular Pays, the product and engineering team members make micro decisions that impact the trajectory of our product and ultimately, the trajectory of our business. These can be decisions to punt on parts of a feature, release an MVP iteration, or make the call to take on some tech debt to keep the sprint moving forward. To make these decisions, we need to know that there is shared context across our team on the business priorities, customers needs, and the problems we are solving. If context is shared, micro decisions become less risky.
To caveat, we are not a perfect product organization, but we do our best considering the size of our team and the ever changing industry and landscape in which we operate.
To understand our Product Discovery process, we can look at the When, What, Who and How of Product Discovery.
When: product discovery is an always on process that drives and validates our product strategy and vision. It impacts our roadmap and validates the implementation work we do in each sprint. Product Discovery can scale up and down depending on the size of the problem we are investigating. For us, we are engaged in Product Discovery when looking to innovate and improve our core platform. At our stage, we think of our product as having core functionality, and we focus our energy on improving and innovating around the edges of our offering.
What: Product discovery is a process to identify and validate problems.
Who: Product discovery needs to be a cross functional effort that includes:
- the doers: owners of the design and implementation
- stakeholders: those impacted by product decisions
- decision makers: accountable for product decisions
How: In this always on Product Discovery mentality, it can be viewed as a tool box of activities: like hypothesis testing, customer interviews, design sprints, journey mapping, persona development or data analysis.
You can see our full presentation here.
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