Product Discovery

What is Product Discovery?

Product discovery is the process of learning about potential customers and their needs to inform the development of a new product. It’s a structured process for uncovering insights that drive new product development. If you’re in the process of creating a new product, you need to find out if anyone will want to buy it.

That’s where Product Discovery comes into play. Instead of diving right into building your product, with these steps you can make sure that it’s something people actually want before putting in all that effort. Product Discovery is not specific to any one industry; it can be used by companies across all sectors and sizes. The principles are universal and may also be referred to as Customer Discovery, User Research, or Market Research depending on the situation and company size.

What is the goal of Product Discovery?

The goal of product discovery is to uncover insights about your customer and the problem you want to solve for them. You want to find out what drives their behavior, what keeps them up at night, and what goals they’re trying to achieve. You want to identify pain points, discover frustrations and desires, and find out what your customer’s desired outcomes look like. With this information, you can build a product that solves a real problem and helps your customer get what they want.

 Reasons to Choose Product Discovery before you build a mobile or web app

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Learn about your customer

Before you start diving into the problem you want to solve and the tools you want to use, understand who your audience is. What is their demographic, who are they as people? What are they looking to get out of your product?

What problems are they trying to solve? These are all questions that will help you understand your customer better. Understanding your customer will also help you decide what problem you want to solve for them.

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Determine the Problem(s) You Want to Solve

Next, you’ll want to determine what problem(s) you want to solve for your customer. You might already have an idea in your head about what you want to do, but you want to make sure you’re solving an actual problem that your customer has. For example, let’s say you want to create a new fitness app.

You know that people are interested in fitness and have a lot of desire to become healthier, but is that the problem you want to solve? If you want to create an app that helps users track their workouts, you’re solving a real problem.

But let’s say you want to create an app that helps users engage in healthy eating habits by providing them with recipes and meal plans. This is also a problem that people have.

Select the Right Tools for User Research

You want to make sure you’re using the right tools for your user research. Depending on the problem you want to solve, you may want to look at different techniques.

For example, if you want to create a new health and wellness product, you might want to take a look at qualitative and quantitative methods. Qualitative methods help you understand your customers’ motivations and desires. They’re helpful for capturing unstructured data about your customer.

You can use qualitative research tools like focus groups, interviews, and surveys. Quantitative tools are helpful for measuring behavior and generating data that you can use to make predictions about the future. These tools help understand your customers’ behaviors.

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Run Your User Interviews

Now that you know the tools you want to use, it’s time to get out there and do the research! Get in front of potential customers and ask them questions.

Find out what they’re looking to get out of your product and how they currently solve their problem. You may want to conduct surveys, one-on-one interviews, or even do focus groups to get as much information as you can.

It’s important to get as much information as you can from as many customers as you can. You want to make sure you’re getting a wide variety of people to make sure the results are accurate.

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Synthesize Your Research and Conclusion

Now that you’ve conducted your research, it’s time to synthesize your findings and come to a conclusion. You want to make sure that you’re interpreting your insights correctly.

What do your findings mean for your product? What does this mean for your business? What can you do to build something that solves a real problem for your customers? How can you grow your business from there?

Now, it’s time to build that product! You’ve taken the time to understand your customers better, which means you’re more likely to build something that they want and need. This will enable you to start bringing in more revenue and give your customers the product they want.

Discovery & Design Steps

Empathizing

  • Defining and understanding the participants and roles in the product being created – in the development process and in the target solution
  • Defining and understanding the end user

Problem definition

  • Defining the problem that exists in the market for a given user profile
  • Frame your problem statement according to specific users

Ideation

  • User story mapping. Defining the Product Backlog (scope of work) with the help of User Stories describing the processes
  • Sketches (low fidelity) presenting the user flow in the application
  • Definition of processes interacting with other modules

Building prototypes

  • High fidelity wireframes visualizing the graphical interface
  • Extending mockups with a clickable prototype
  • Database structure. Database model describing table and field structure

UI/UX Product Design

The key is to select the most important problems whose solution will significantly change the life of the target user. Thanks to such an approach, already at the stage of Discovery and Design, it will be possible to build a successful product on the market much faster. It is always worth asking yourself the question “what value does the feature give to our user? Is it worth the investment?”

They conducted a workshop with us

Budlex

From the beginning, GMI was able to anticipate possible risks and interruptions. The design environment was adapted to our working mode and was simple enough for the product owner to meet his requirements and those of the development team.

Thanks to the great attention to the quality of the code, the project was delivered on time and there were no internal complications associated with the product development. However, there were external complications (service providers), which GMI helped to solve with us.

See Case Study

Coders Lab

With the greatest pleasure and full responsibility, we recommend GMI as a professional contractor for web applications and CMS systems. We chose GMI primarily because they approached our inquiry very professionally. Very fluent contact at an early stage of talks announced that the implementation would be equally efficient and it actually was.

If there is an opportunity in the future to jointly implement another project, we will definitely use the services of GMI again.

See Case Study

Q2 Smart Lockers

I have worked with the GMI Group on many projects over the last 4 years. I have always been satisfied with the quality of the commissioned works, which were made by Mikołaj Lehman and his entire programming team.

GMI has unique skills to translate ideas into reality. They are very efficient, discreet and, above all, trustworthy.

See Case Study

Start working on your Product Discovery right away!

     
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