Undertaking a product development journey is not easy. Multiple teams across the org join hands, contribute, communicate, and build a product that can drive business results.
However, despite all the effort and investments, nearly 95% of products fail in the market.
According to Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, nearly 3000 products are introduced into the market each year, and 95 percent of them miss the mark.
3,000 products, this is massive, right? What, however, is heartbreaking is the failure rate.
Multiple different factors can lead to a product that fails to satisfy its intended audience.
However, more than often, it is the lack of emphasis on the ‘product discovery’ stage that increases the odds of failure for most product teams.
Product discovery is a proven practice to find out more about customers, their needs, and whether your proposed solution will work or not.
Besides product discovery, we will also understand the concept and significance of continuous discovery, key differences in these two seemingly similar practices, and more importantly, we’ll help you understand what comes after a product launch: product discovery or continuous discovery.
Let’s get started.
What is product discovery?
A well-planned and well-executed product discovery process can help product teams demand the right kind of data and generate the most relevant insights to build products that resonate with what customers like or have purchased in the past.
PD or product discovery can be defined in multiple ways and in different contexts. But if you simplify the concept to its bare essentials, product discovery is a collaborative and essential step in the making of a product that stands to win customer confidence and help teams behind the product excel in their roles.
In the product discovery process, cross-functional teams share one common platform and together think about a product that will solve one (or many) customer problems and help the business generate revenue for a longer period of time.
Almost every business and every industry can benefit from embarking on a product discovery journey where doers, dreamers, and enablers form a team and propose a product that has not yet made it to the market.
However, PD teams can also wear the ‘discovery hats’ to optimize an existing product and serve an active customer base.
“Productboard defines product discovery as “a process that helps product teams refine their ideas by deeply understanding real user problems and then landing on the best way to solve them.”
What is continuous discovery?
Product discovery is important, but it’s equally important to keep refining your project so customers just can not have enough of your product experience.
In this era of digital innovation and rapid development, it’s pivotal to keep delivering value to your customer base to ensure your product succeeds in the market.
Continuous discovery or continuous product discovery helps teams avoid customer disappointment - and thus, failures that most apps face sooner or later.
CD can be understood as ‘product discovery that never stops during the entire deployment and deployment lifecycle and continues even after the launch of the digital product.’
The mindset of ‘a never-ending discovery process’ allows for continuous improvement and sets the foundation of a product that never loses its charm.
In the realm of product discovery and continuous discovery, there is one very interesting concept that needs a special mention here is, ‘Double Diamond Model.’
The Double Diamond Design Thinking
The Double Diamond framework can help companies apply design characteristics to find creative solutions and innovative ideas.
It's an outcomes-based framework that encourages creativity and innovation while focusing on the core issue and its impact on end-users.
The framework consists of four phases: Discovery, Define, Development and Delivery.
Discovery
The first step of the double diamond is discovery, learning about the problem and starting the initial research into the challenges and problems that need to be solved. This can be done through user research and market research. Discovery can produce lots of different outcomes, sometimes you can have a discovery which you don’t find out that much other times you can find you’re overloaded with tonnes of data and research.
If you end up snowed under with all of this information make sure you know how to manage and organize all of the data. You can store this information through empathy maps or customer journey maps.
Define
At the end of discovery, you should have a tonne of insights. The definition stage takes all of these insights and elaborates on it. The purpose of the definition is to refine your initial assumption based on the learnings from the discovery. The point of doing this research is to challenge your initial assumption so if you find in the discovery that the problem is different to what you expected then you can change the following phases.
Development
This phase of the double diamond does have a few names, Virgin Atlantic Airways call it “design”, Microsoft calls this “implement”, in the UK Government it is called “alpha”. In development, you are trying to come up with different answers to the problem identified in the define stage. As part of this phase we may do sketches, wireframes and prototypes to visualize different solutions and test them with users. We will collaborate with a range of people and co-designing with people.
Delivery
From the development stage, you’ll have a few different ideas you want to try out. You will want to try out those ideas on a small scale and then when you see a trend for the ideas that aren’t working you will want to remove them and take forward the ideas that do work.
Product discovery vs. Product continuous discovery
The most important point to note here is that we need both - product discovery and continuous discovery. The first practice will help us build the right products or the right features. And the second practice will hep us keep that product or feature relevant to our customers for a longer period of time.
Product discovery | Continuous discovery |
|---|---|
Product teams use it all the time | Not all product teams have yet to come to terms with the idea of continuous discovery |
One of the earliest stages of product development | Runs through the entire product development lifecycle |
Essential to the development of a customer-centric product | Essential to keep the product relevant to its customers |
Requires extensive work on the part of the stakeholders as there is not much to lean on in terms of support and growth | The product is already there - teams only need to explore customer data and keep the improvement going |
Product discovery is often time-consuming and is a one-time affair | Continuous discovery, as the term suggests, spreads across different stages of a product life cycle |
What comes after the product launch?
The laggards across industries put an end to discovery once they launch the product in the market.
The truth is some of the best companies and teams worldwide continue with discovery even after the product is shared with the customers.
It’s only through continuous discovery and improvement that you can make a product that makes a difference in the life of a customer. You can not expect this kind of impact with ‘one-time discovery.’
Coming back to our question, yes, it is ‘product continuous discovery’ that comes after a product launch.
Product discovery and continuous discovery: How teams can leverage the two (and should they?)
Product discovery and continuous discovery are no two separate things - teams can leverage both the philosophies to ensure ‘continuous value’ for customers.
To take advantage of both the practices, the first step is to get the shareholder buy-in. Training the team members and communicating the value to all stakeholders is key to ensure a seamless adoption of these practices.
For this, you can create a comprehensive documentation on the significance of PD and CD. Also expect lots of questions and queries. So be prepared for that.
The next step is to chart out a course of action.
To build a plan that works, it is important to never lose sight of your customers. Involve them from the beginning. The interactions will yield some very powerful product ideas and help streamline the next stages in the development process.
A few final thoughts
Leading companies are increasingly investing in product discovery programs. They are impressed with the results.
By imbibing these practices early on in your product development and launch phases, you too can generate tremendous value for your business and customers.
At Kellton, we have helped - and are still helping - a number of companies and teams get more value from their PD and CD investments. And we’d love to help you, too!
Whether you are just starting out or are midway in your discovery and development phases, we can help. Connect with Team Kellton here.
