Product Discovery

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Product Discovery is a process that has the objective of ensuring you’re solving the right user need in the right way

Understanding what we have

Idea Management

Are you managing the Ideas that appear every day from everywhere? Ideas can come from everywhere, but do they have enough evidence? Is the source of the problem and opportunity clear?

One efficient way to manage ideas is to have a portal where everyone can post an idea, but that portal needs to have a form with required questions to provide context and reflection, for example

What problem are you trying to solve?
Who has this problem? What type of user/persona?
What portion of these users do you believe will be impacted by this? (%)
Do you have any evidence that this problem exists?
How this problem is addressed today?
What do you intend to improve with this?
How confident you are in the information you provided? (from 1 to 5)
Is this related to any of our existing OKRs? Wich one?
How much do you think this can impact our business? (from 1 to 5)

What do we want to achieve with this? 1) Having a record of the ideas reduces the anxiety of Stakeholders 2) Having a form that needs to be filled reduces the suggestions considerably (People are lazy or simply don’t have the information) 3) Create an open space for everyone to provide ideas and insights.

Even doing this it still can be a little chaothic, so one way to create some order from chaos is by establishing broader themes and then tagging each item with which particular theme.

Not managing efficiently the Ideas will consume a lot of your time.

Note: Did you realize that in some of the questions we ask about Reach, Impact, and Confidence? Also, we asked about the connection to OKRs? This is a first step toward using RICE or ICE frameworks for scoring and prioritizing the Ideas. Of course, we are not going to blindly believe in everything that is provided in the form and that is why we need to validate, but it works as an initial filter and understanding.

The main SaaS products for Product Managers have Idea Management modules.

Roadmunk Feedback & idea management
- Capture Ideas
- Prioririze Ideas with RICE out-of-the-box
Aha! Ideas
craft.io Feedback Portal

CSD Matrix

CSD stands for:

Certainties - what is known and confirmed
Suppositions - what is known but not confirmed
Doubts - what is not known

CSD Matrix

There is always a lot of talk about the market, users, strategy, and product. Are you completely sure that everything people tell you is true? Is certain information a Certainty, Supposition, or Doubt? What are the evidences? Gather together people with that information and use this technique to figure it out.

To facilitate:

Gather your stakeholders for a 45 min session
Use 5 minutes to explain and give examples to help them
Let them fill freely the board for at least 10 minutes
Discuss for 20 minutes
Use the last 10 minutes to wrap-up and align the discoveries

Tip: If it is an online session you can use tools such as Miro, Trello, EasyRetro, TeamRetro or FunRetrospectives.

Opportunity Solution Tree

Created by Teresa Torres (author of Continuous Discovery Habits), it is a brainstorming tool to uncover opportunities and possible solutions to achieve the Desired Outcome. It is a mental representation in the form of a mindmap as shown below.

The idea is to align and connect around the desired outcome, showing opportunities that we discovered in our research, proposed solutions to address those opportunities, and experiments to evaluate our solutions.

Opportunity Solution Tree

References:

Opportunity Solution Trees: Visualize Your Thinking (by Teresa Torres)
Why This Opportunity Solution Tree is Changing the Way Product Teams Work (by Teresa Torres)

Personas

Persona is a used-centered design tool where you describe fictional characters that represent the types of buyers or users you have that buy (Buyer Persona) and/or use your product (User Persona).

Checkout these examples provided by Justinmind.

Available Templates

Recommended Tools

Make My Persona(by Hubspot)
Xtensio Persona Tool (by Xtensio)
UXPressia Persona Tool (by UXPressia)
UserForge
PersonApp
Delve.ai - an Automated Persona based on Google Analytics

Double Diamond Framework

Main concepts

We need to Diverge to Converge
Separate Problem Space from Solution Space

Double Diamond Framework