Introduction
We all know that Product managers and Product People plays a crucial role in enhancing product capability, driving innovation, and delivering value to customers / buyers / users.
Continuous Product Discovery offers a powerful approach for product people to unlock the full potential of their products. By embracing this approach, product managers can proactively gather insights, engage with customers, and make data-driven decisions throughout the product development lifecycle.
In this article, using couple of use-cases and scenarios, we will explore how product people can leverage Continuous Product Discovery to enhance their product capability.
Let's start with Continuous product discovery - From my experience and experiential journey, #CPD is aligned towards the desirability, viability and feasibility which we map towards the need of technology enablement, user experience, customers, users or business viability.
Myth - people often think that Continuous Product Discovery is only for users and new features / functionalities.
What is Continuous Product Discovery?
Continuous product discovery (CPD) is an approach and mindset to gather and analyze data about :
- your users, your market, your product,
- your product / solution / offerings state in the Product Life Cycle
- are you aligned to your product vision?
- are your aligned to company initiative and objectives?
- is there any deviation happened?
- and, your competitors etc.
Eventually, in order to identify new opportunities for product improvement. It is an ongoing and continuous journey that is aligned to your product life cycle [PLC].
Before, we move further and share more about the CPD, lets talk about: What happens when Discovery and Delivery Interacts together?
- you will find that there is a disconnect between discovery and delivery
- gap in alignment of the vision and objectives of business and technology
- research is done totally different and focus is not aligned
- you would have also seen that many decisions are based on Opinion and by HIPPO
- in the image below you can see difference between continuous activity as #CPD vs pinion / hippo
Eventually, you can see how does discovery and delivery are aligned [refer to the image below], however, you can also see that there is a disconnect:
- Disconnect between Delivery Team and Discovery team / business people
- inputs are not received from delivery team
- you will also find that Technical Team is more focused on building and delivery i.e. 75-80% there time is focused on technical
- you will find that Discovery team is more focused on ideas-discovery [upto 80%] and they spend very less on the tactical side
Why we should do and include Continuous Product Discovery in PLC?
Here are some of the reasons why we should do and include continuous product discovery for digital products and solutions:
To meet the needs of our users / customers: The best way to build successful digital products is to meet the needs of your users / customers. Continuous product discovery helps you to understand needs and pain points so that you can build products / solution that they will find solving the problem.
To improve the quality of our products: By continuously gathering and analyzing data, you can identify and address problems early on. This helps to improve the quality of your products and ensures that they are meeting the expectations of your users.
To save time and money: By identifying and addressing problems early on, you can reduce the need for costly rework. This saves you time and money in the long run.
To stay ahead of the competition: The digital landscape is constantly evolving, so it's important to stay ahead of the competition by continuously innovating and improving your products. Continuous product discovery helps you to identify new opportunities for product improvement so that you can stay ahead of the curve.
Today, we all are in the world of Prompt and Generative AI. I tried to find what google does in their CPD space, you can refer to the image below.
Why Continuous Product Discovery should be done along with the Product Life Cycle?
As a product person, I would always recommend to understand where are you performing continuous product discovery? Which state of Product Life Cycle you are in?
It does not matter are you creating a Product or Solution as a Product [SaaP] or Platform as a Product [PaaP] or Service as a Product [SraaP]? Your continuous product discovery process #CPD must be aligned and focused towards following:
Identify business goals. What are the business goals that the product team is trying to achieve? These goals could be anything from increasing user engagement to driving revenue or increasing RoI etc.
Translate business goals into product outcomes. What specific outcomes need to be achieved in order to meet the business goals? Are we aligned to the business objectives? These outcomes could be things like reducing churn, increasing conversion rates, or improving the customer experience or reducing infra usability cost etc.
Create and automate weekly customer touchpoints. How can the product team get feedback from customers on a regular basis? This could involve conducting surveys, user interviews, or A/B testing, telemetry data etc.
Understand customer desires, needs, and pain points. What do customers want and need from the product? What are their pain points? The product team needs to understand this in order to create products that are truly valuable to users.
Iteratively improve the product. Once the product team has a good understanding of customer needs, they can start to iteratively improve the product. This involves making small changes to the product, testing them with users, and then iterating again based on the feedback. To know more about point 4, you may visit to one of my blog which I wrote on Product Thinking - Why we need it as Product Capability?
Many times, people from the enterprise organization ask me that why do we need to know Where is your Product / solution is in the Product Life cycle?
To answer this - You can start thinking from these questions as:
What is new?
What are my sales?
How does my revenue looks like?
What are we doing for growth?
Is there any risk associated?
Is there any penalty?
Is there any compliance risk?
Is there any regulatory risk?
Few folks asked me that we do not serve for market, we have our own brands as market? What we should think and ask:
I replied to them that consider your market as Internal Market and we have had coined that word as Business to Internal Brands, then ask these questions:
Are we making our Solutions highly places?
What are we doing to make our Solutions across all Brands?
We know out internal brands and market, why they don't take our solutions?
It's too easy to make a sales inside an Org, why are we lacking?
We know our Business and Technology, but why we are not able to onboard all brands?
Does my solution as a product cater compliance risk of all countries where we serve? What we can do?
Does my solution as a product address business alignment?
Does our proposed solution has user desirability and business viability?
Is this investment can help to make things better?
Does this proposed XYZ is going to make UX better
I would propose to all product people to think towards business and user experience, rather than more focused towards the technical enablement.
One of the way - You may apply EXTREME THINKING and using HMW in your Product Thinking and Idea Generation.
How-Might-We questions are a way to frame your ideation, and often used for identifying, launching discussion and perform brainstorming from a Product UX perspective as below:
** Ideation: HMW can be used to generate new ideas for products or features. For example, a product manager might ask "How might we make it easier for users to find the information they need?" or "How might we improve the user experience of our product?"
** Development: HMW can be used to identify potential problems with a product or feature. For example, a product people might ask "How might we prevent users from getting lost in our product?" or "How might we make our product more accessible to users with disabilities?"
** Launch: HMW can be used to gather feedback from users after a product or feature has been launched. For example, a product people might ask "How might we improve the onboarding experience for new users?" or "How might we make our product more engaging for users?"
** Growth: HMW can be used to identify opportunities for growth. For example, a product people might ask "How might we reach new users?" or "How might we increase user engagement?"
** Maturity: HMW can be used to identify ways to keep a product or feature relevant. For example, a product people might ask "How might we keep our product up-to-date with the latest trends?" or "How might we make our product more appealing to a wider range of users?"
** Decline: HMW can be used to identify ways to revive a product or feature. For example, a product people might ask "How might we make our product more relevant to the needs of our users?" or "How might we make our product more affordable?"
HMW is a powerful tool that can be used at any stage of the product life cycle. By asking "How might we?", product people can identify opportunities to improve their products and make them more successful.
What does the benefit we get out of Continuous Product Discovery?
helps in creating value driven approach
identifying the right problem
framing the right problem between Need, Want and Desire
Increased Revenue - Products that are well-designed and meet the needs of users are more likely to be successful in the marketplace. This can lead to increased revenue for the product team and the company as a whole.
Risk of Failure is identified and reduced - By gathering feedback from users early in the product development process, product teams can identify and address potential risks before they become major issues. This can help to reduce the risk of failure and ensure that the product is successful.
Early Validation: By continuously testing and validating product ideas, features, and prototypes, teams can identify potential issues and opportunities early on. This reduces the risk of investing significant resources in developing a product that may not meet customer expectations.
Improved Decision-Making: Regularly collecting data and user feedback enables data-driven decision-making. Instead of relying on assumptions, teams have concrete evidence to support their choices, leading to more informed and effective product decisions.
Reduced Waste: Continuous product discovery reduces the likelihood of building features or products that customers do not find valuable. This minimizes waste by focusing on delivering features with high customer impact.
Conclusion
By Understanding Need, Purpose and Want: Continuous Product Discovery provides product people with a powerful framework to enhance product capability and drive innovation. By embracing a customer-centric mindset, enabling continuous learning, leveraging data, using collaboration as a tool, iterating and validating assumptions, product people can elevate their product's capability and deliver exceptional value to customers. By implementing #CPD practices, product folks can position themselves as strategic drivers of product success, ensuring their products remain competitive, relevant, and highly capable in today's dynamic business landscape.
By Understanding State of Product Life Cycle: Continuous Product Discovery empowers product people to enhance product capability throughout the product life cycle. By embracing this iterative approach during the introduction and ideation, development and launch, growth and iteration, maturity and optimization, and decline and sunset stages, product people can gather insights, validate assumptions, and continuously refine the product's capabilities. This results in a highly competitive and customer-centric product that delivers value and remains relevant in a dynamic market. Incorporating Continuous Product Discovery into each stage of the product life cycle enables product people to maximize their product's potential and drive long-term success.
About the Author
Anubhav Sinha is a Co-founder as well as the Course Developer of the Product Capability Uplift courses. In this role, Anubhav leads the development of the PMA as well as works as the product thinker of the Product Capability Uplift PMA.
Anubhav Sinha is a product coach, a product management practitioner and technology product geek with around one and half decade of the product management and development experience that ranges widely in the B2B and B2IB product space. He is known for contributing and creating products majorly in the start-up space, helping start-ups in their early stages and contributing industry product organisations as user-experience flow optimiser. He had served industry as Principal Product Owner [co-founder], Product and Design Thinking Coach, Product Owner and Transformation Coach.
Anubhav holds a Post-Graduation in Marketing - IB and Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical and Electronics.
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