May 2, 2023
Product discovery, or what we sometimes call a “discovery phase” when it’s part of a standalone project, is all about understanding the problem. It’s the activity of clearing a path through ambiguity to get to positive outcomes, those outcomes usually being: a better understanding what problem you’re trying to solve; how you’re going to solve it; and why you’re doing any of this in the first place.
Going into it, there’s always varying degrees of answers that already exist to those questions. Some will be well defined, some chock full of assumptions, and others still little more than vague sense of direction. A key role of effective discovery is to pick through all that and figure out what’s worth challenging, what’s been done for us already, and what really needs our attention.
There’s a lot of talk about frameworks, models and approaches when it comes to discovery, all with their own pros and cons. But in this post I want to dig a little more into the practical side of discovery, and why I prefer a principle based approach.
I was describing the focus of our new agency to an acquaintance recently, and they asked me what framework I used for discovery. The funny thing was, I couldn’t really answer it. There wasn’t one method or approach I could point to, and on reflection I realised that’s because I hadn't been thinking about it in those terms for a long time.
That isn’t to say I’m not structured, I certainly am. And I’ve been trained in and applied a whole bunch of different methodologies and tools in the past. But as with any discipline, the more you do it, the more you come to understand the underlying principles, and can learn to intuitively and adaptively apply them as needed in different situations.
techniques and frameworks are really just principles applied to specific contexts
Something I've come to realise over recent years, and not just in the work context, is that things like techniques, frameworks or methodologies are really just principles applied to specific contexts. They can be super useful to wheel out the first time we find ourselves in a new situation or context. But they shouldn’t be a substitute for the adaptability and flexibility that comes from a principle based approach.
Of course I apreciate there are lots of ways to approach discovery and each of us will have our own angle on things from our unique backgrounds and experiences. But all that said, here's what's worked for me.
It’s critical to get your head into the world of the problem we’re trying to solve (what we sometimes call the ‘problem space’), understanding as much as possible about a client’s business, users, the marketplace, what they’ve done to date, etc. The best way to do this is to talk to the people who know it best - such as clients, SMEs, business owners, customers and users.
I once went on a ride-along with one of our client’s sales reps as they visited high street phone stores around central London, as research for a big platform we were developing. That one day probably gave me more insight into how they operated as a business, and the challenges faced by their user base, than all the briefs and strategy decks I’d read up until that point put together.
Conversely I’ve seen consultants spend (waste!) weeks compiling huge market signal and Q&A spreadsheets, only to rarely refer to them again. It’s a lot of energy for little value: it's such a huge amount of information that no human brain can hope to synthesise it all into something useful, and ultimately it’s a poor substitute for just talking to people.
Yes, if you don’t have a huge amount of domain knowledge, you need a bit of up front reading to establish the common language we’re talking in, but you can’t really start research in earnest until you’ve spoken to the people in the thick of it and understood what motivates them.
I’ve also seen things go awry when people get too hung up on questioning the foundations too early on. One particular product principle I worked with briefly was notorious for this, and it rubbed clients up the wrong way something crazy. I’m not surprised. Good discovery starts from a motivation, and explores things from there. It accepts we will probably need to answer a lot of why questions as we go, doesn’t get hung up on challenging everything before we have enough information to make an informed call.
Going into discovery, all we can ever really be clear about up front is what we’re aiming for (i.e. an outcome). We might not be 100% clear on why we’re shooting for that goal (uncertainty), but it’s crucial everyone’s on board with the idea that it's at least worth aiming for it (motivation), and that there’s trust in how we want to go about doing it.
I’ve often found that the motivation is based off little more than a general sense things could change for the better, and that’s ok. Part of good discovery for me is answering that question. But as long as we’ve sought alignment on the outcome and the motivation, then we’re all good!
To borrow an analogy: imagine we’re shipwrecked on the south shore of an island. We’ve been camped up for a couple days, but now the water’s rising and food’s running short. We know we probably can’t stay where we are for long (motivation), and we’ve heard that maybe there’s better shelter and food on the north side (outcome), but we don’t know for certain what’s waiting for us there, or if it’s even worth going (uncertainty).
Good discovery is like the scouting party - we send them out to map a route, check out the location, and report back on whether it’s really all it’s made out to be. Along the way they might find some better locations; they might even discover it’s better staying where we are and making a few improvements to camp instead.
And importantly, perhaps the initial motivation was flawed - maybe the water’s not rising that high and someone just got spooked. But we at least now we have enough information to make an informed decision about what to do next. Is it worth challenging those starting assumptions further or were they right all along, and we are indeed better heading off into that jungle?
We can all follow a process or methodology, and absolutely when we’re starting out in careers it’s useful to have clear steps to follow - it helps maintain quality and consistency, and avoid easy mistakes. But one thing I think it’s easy to lose sight of in that, is the creativity and synthesis that can only come intuitively from years of experience.
I once worked with an experienced project manager who was great at keeping delivery on the straight and narrow, but always insisted on planning discovery work with the same amount of rigour and depth as a build phase. This inevitably led to specific outputs being produced because we’d committed to them up front, even when they no longer held any value to the project (or worse, were made totally irrelevant by something else).
Instead its important to allow ourselves to follow the threads where they lead, being guided by the situation and the subject matter experts, and being prepared to throw out one plan and make a new one as new information comes to light. Being outcome orientated - focussing on the goal we set out to achieve - helps avoid going too far down the wrong track, but also allows us to rapidly explore and assess promising looking avenues as we find them.
It’s even better if you can do that as part of a small collaborative team - its a no brainer really. Everyone will bring differing insights, ideas and potential approaches, and by discussing these and playing off each other you’ll not only come up with some solid approaches, but also generate some creative ideas and solutions in the process.
As much as I can, I try to be a vessel for the outcome and not impart too much of my own assumptions into the process. Of course part of our job here is to come up with creative ideas and solutions, and they ultimately come from somewhere within each of us. But that creativity should always be in the sense of adding to what we do know, rather than masking over what we don’t.
It’s also crucial to stay as agnostic as possible about each idea until you’ve tested and validated (or rejected) it, and to avoid the temptation to fill in gaps in information with your own conclusions. If it’s unknown that’s ok, but it’s then an imperative to go and find out the answer or accept it as part of the overall uncertainty and risk.
Finally, we should also aim to apply the spirit of adaptability to the format in which we present information back to others, whether that’s for research and user testing, discussion with stakeholders, or to communicate what needs to be built to a development team. The latter is sometimes called definition of ready, and of course there are some core expectations and requirements that all organisations will have (and for good reason) before things can move on to the next stage.
But here what I'm talking about is how best we communicate and find alignment on goals, motivations and solutions to people with a stake in successful outcomes. What format and medium is going to get the message across best to the intended audience. A 40 page spec might be the best way of helping get a solution written up into dev tickets, but I’ve yet to find a client that wanted to read one all the way through, and I’ve seen whole sections of development get missed because the team went granular on tasks and weren’t keyed in to the overall picture.
The simple answer, as with everything, is that there isn't one right approach. It's a judgement call based on each individual or group - their needs, how bought in they already are, how they think, and what we want them to do next. They key is finding a format that will tell the story to them in their own language. That might be a deck, a diagram, scamps, a clickable prototype (super easy these days with tools like Sketch or Figma) or something else entirely. It might mean a lot of detail, high level, or something co-created. It all depends on the nature of the recipient.
There are of course a whole bunch of different approaches to discovery, some more formalised, others more fly-by-wire, all with their own merits. And I appreciate some of these principles might seem obvious or perhaps even simplistic, but the trick lies in knowing how to apply them and when to flex them. From experience of running countless discovery processes myself - mostly in an agency-client dynamic - I've found the key elements to success to be the flexibility to select and adapt the right tools at point of need. An understanding that can, of course, only come from deep hands on experience.
