Have you been in this situation?
You are given the task of determining what customers want in a new product, a greatly meaningful task for anyone involved in product management and design. You are excited to learn more about your customers and the opportunities that this learning might bring.
You are excited, except for one thing – the solution is already given .
The idea might be coming from your executive leadership. Maybe you already have a solution partially built from some other initiative or acquisition. Or maybe your company feels they lack a statement in a certain field (“We must build something that embraces artificial intelligence! This would look nice on our product page.”).
In any case, you, as a product manager or designer, face the task of justifying the product instead of discovering it. Does this sound familiar?
First, the good news: at least you’ve got a chance to do the analysis! Plenty of companies where a product idea happened to emerge proceed straight to its delivery. You, on the other hand, have a product discovery opportunity, and this is promising. It elevates your role in reducing the company’s risk in its blind pursuit of the solution.
But how does one go about a product discovery when the product is already put in their head? Not much differently, in fact.
You’d still want to aim for a revealing customer discovery where opportunities are thoroughly assessed and gauged against the market and each other. You’d want to ask all the right questions that seek new opportunities and not merely validating the one already prescribed. You’d need to keep your mind free of pre-existing idea bias. Stay open to what your customers are telling you. If you hear a confirmation that the problem you hope to solve exists, great, but do not get hooked on it. Dig deeper, explore, search for other problems. You might discover so much more!
Let’s say you are trying to justify that task A is difficult to complete when doing a particular job. You interview your customer until you get a confirmation of your hypothesis, then perhaps think your job is done. However, if you keep asking your customer – “What else is in your way? What do you do prior to that? What do you do next?” – and not to mention, “Why are you doing this in the first place?” – you might make all kinds of revelations.”. That difficult task A, for example, might actually be a workaround for a much harder task B. If that task B were simplified, then the workaround would not even be needed.
Not only does this discovery leave you with a new opportunity, but not learning this fact at all might lead to a disaster later when a competitor comes in and solves the larger problem, making your product irrelevant.
Assume that you conducted a quality, open-minded customer discovery. Chances are your outcomes would fit one of these cases:
- You discover that the original idea for a product matches the pressing customer problem well. Congratulations! Assuming that this conclusion is genuinely unbiased, this is great news.
- You discover that the original idea is on the right track. However, there were some insightful discoveries about the nature of the customer problem, making it apparent that the concept would need some adjustments. This is a pretty productive outcome! Your next step is the ideation phase, where your team would need to tackle a ‘How might we tweak our idea….?’ design challenge.
- You discover that the problem your product was meant to solve does not exist or is not pressing, at least not for the market that you envisioned. Tough luck. Or rather, you got truly lucky, depending on how you look at it. You just saved your company a major flop. The only problem is how to convey this data to your idea sponsor (which is a topic for a different discussion).
- You discover that there is a much better opportunity to solve a different problem, one that would present an excellent case for your company’s investment. Congratulations once again! Time to start ideating a new solution.
Next time you find yourself facing the need to conduct a product discovery for an already ‘discovered’ product, look on the bright side, and follow these principles:
- keep an open mind for customer discovery
- ask the right questions that seek opportunities rather than validation
- do not ignore data that is not conformant to your starting viewpoint
- frame the ideation challenge accordingly to the discovery outcomes
- help your stakeholders recognize the discovery insights
We all love our ideas, and many companies struggle to evaluate their ideas and solutions objectively. Help yours by leaving room for a true discovery in your product justification discovery journey. Leave room for uncovering what might become your next big success.