Product Discovery is a Waste

That’s what I told myself in order to avoid discovery for a new product I’m building for New Haircut.

Contrary to the discovery methods we teach & use with product leaders at Google, Home Depot, Amazon, Intuit, etc, I skipped discovery and jumped right to solution mode.

I was convinced that I knew what to build… That it would be faster to build first, and measure and iterate after.

❌ [Outcome: Build Trap] I wasted 12 weeks, built the wrong thing, and had to start over.

🔥 In this article, I’ll break down 5 indispensable discovery methods I’m using this time around.

1/ Customer advisory panel

First, I’ve recruited a highly-targeted customer advisory panel of product leaders.
(In an upcoming newsletter, I’m going to share best practices on building these panels, sourced from some UX Research friends of ours.)

Our panel is currently at 5 customers, covering 1 core persona and journey.

As I build up additional evidence on the problems we’re attacking, I’ll build the customer panel to 20 customers. That’ll enable us to widen our coverage to include additional personas and use cases.

💡 Business stakeholders will often pressure you to build an exhaustive panel from day one. This is expensive and unwarranted. Start small and add segments only after your core persona validates your problem space.

2/ Problem Discovery

Next, I conducted Problem Discovery interviews to prioritize and understand our customers’ needs — as much as I think I know them all, inside and out.

Some of the questions I ask include:

• What’s your most important job that causes you the most problems?
• How do you currently complete that job?
• Tell me about the last time you did it? What problems did you run into? How you did you navigate them?
• What worked well with your approach?
• What didn’t work well?

💡During problem discovery, having scripted questions is helpful. But knowing when to go off-script and allow your interview participant to take you on an unexpected riff are the magical moments when you discover their hidden, unmet needs.

3/ Problem Framing

Third, I used our own Problem Framing process to connect company objectives to reframed customer needs.

Our business objective for 2023 is to grow and diversify revenue with new self-directed offers for our core market of product leaders.

I’ll use the insights from my problem discovery interviews to identify customer-centered opportunities that will achieve that business goal.

[Output] Hyper-focused, customer-validated problem statement to guide our upcoming solution discovery.

At this point, we’re clear and aligned on the right problem to solve. Now we’re ready to solve the problem right.

4/ Design Sprints

Next, I used our advanced format of Design Sprints to concept and test new offers efficiently.

Our favorite tool for gathering rapid customer feedback is a prototype. Our most trusted framework for prototyping is a design sprint.

Notice that in order to be ready for solutioning via design sprints, we started with business strategy and problem discovery. That business and customer lens provided the right foundation to prime the team with viable, desirable, and feasible solutions.

When we’re building new products, we run design sprints in batches of 3s:

• Foundational sprint: Get feedback on an initial solution we’re curious about
• Iteration sprint: Iterate our initial solution to close the gaps on things we missed or messed up during our foundational sprint
• Alt sprint: Get feedback on 1–2 alternative ideas — something to compare against our initial solution

💡One major pitfall we fell into during our early days of running design sprints was going all in on our first ideas; i.e. we fell victim to our own solution bias. This was especially true if we received lots of positive customer feedback. But our first ideas are rarely are best.

Running iteration and alt sprints following our foundation sprint allowed us to build on what we had learned while allowing new and interesting ideas to surface.

💡Use our Design Sprint Advanced Playbook (free) for a comprehensive guide on running high-impact design sprints, including pro tips, examples, and our team’s sprint upgrades.

5/ Opportunity Playbook

Finally, I built out an Opportunity Playbook to help us see and decide which ideas to add to our roadmap, and take to market.

This playbook includes things like:

• Business objective overview
• Market opportunity analysis
• Competitive analysis
• For each idea: path to revenue, risks, investment

💡We always try to have at least two (ideally three) opportunities per playbook. Doing so enables us to compare options. It provides us a range of opportunities based on our risk appetite, budget, and timeline.

Where to next

Our discovery-powered product development landed us some exciting products we’re busy building.

But discovery isn’t a one-and-done thing. We follow a continuous discovery practice. That means as we move from prototype to MVP to scale, we’ll continue to test and learn with our product leader market.

That’s the beauty of our customer advisory panel — it enables us to schedule customer interviews each week, so we can keep learning and building products our customers needs — products that deserve to exist.

👋 If you’re a Director / VP of Product Management or Design and would like to join our panel, get in touch.

Your turn

Listen, product discovery is hard! We all look for shortcuts, hacks, and silver bullets to avoid it. Myself included.

I hope you consider the discovery methods I shared today. I highlighted the ones I use and trust most.

Just remember: New Haircut spent years building and iterating our playbook of discovery methods.

If you’re just getting started, introduce parts of each method, one at a time. Go slow. Experiment based on your team and needs.

Most importantly, steer clear of trying to go from a product maturity of 0 to 5, let alone 0 to 10. Doing so will burn you and the team out. It’s also a surefire way to build enemies with your cross-functional partners.