Product Discovery is a process employed by product teams to deeply understand real problems of users’ and develop the most effective solutions (hopefully through the product they’ll be pitching 🙂).

Understanding the customer’s problem is crucial, as it helps you achieve Product Market Fit and other key objectives.

Duh ! .. now all this seems obvious, right ? Surprisingly, however, many organizations invest less time and effort into product discovery than it truly requires.

Now, this is a vast topic but here is a list of some practical tips that I’ve found helpful during my journey as a Product Manager; when conducting discovery sessions, interviews or workshops with various stakeholders.

What do you start with, in the Product Discovery process ?

In some cases, you might already have a basic problem definition or product goals to initiate the discovery exercise. However, these elements can be defined, refined, or adjusted during the discovery sessions.

Conducting background research on the business model, the organization, competitors, and key metrics is an excellent starting point before your first discovery meeting. So here are 8 tips and techniques for acing Product Interviews as a Product Manager in your organization.

👉Tip # 1. Conduct Product discovery like an exploratory market research. Involve all stakeholders and understand the current process & pain points.

• Do’s: It is very important to find & connect with all stakeholders involved from the beginning itself. These are the folks you’ll interview & gather the requirements from. For example: For a Patient Management system, stakeholders could extend beyond hospital administrators and doctors to include nursing staff, the accounts team, and even the patients’ attendants, who may use the system in different ways. Gathering requirements from all relevant stakeholders helps avoid confusion, conflicts, and wasted time and effort, providing a comprehensive view of the system’s needs.
• Do’s: Try and understand the user’s business , the workflow, their routine when using the existing solution. Questions like: ‘How does this work’, or ‘What are the next steps’ or ‘what happens then…’ help you get insights.
• Don’ts: During the discovery exercise and initial meetings, avoid suggesting solutions. At this stage, you likely lack sufficient data and insights, and an ad-hoc or obvious solution may not be optimal or even suitable for an MVP.

👉Tip # 2. Recording the customer interview word for word is often important as asking the right questions.

• Importance: This is important yet often overlooked. Make sure to get permission to record the interview, excluding any confidential information. It’s challenging to take notes during the interview, even with AI note-taking apps. I’ve found that recordings are invaluable for documenting requirements later on and gaining a deeper understanding.

👉Tip # 3.  Ask Why multiple times – sometimes you may need to ask ‘Why’ 5 times or more !

• Importance: There was a joke on linkedin recently – What do Backstreet Boys and Product Managers have in common ?  They both keep asking – “Tell me Why?” lol.   But jokes apart, a good product manager needs to be persistent and ask why to get to the user’s real pain-point or the actual un-served need.  Often the first response reflects symptoms, not root causes. Probing deeper is what reveals the underlying drivers of behavior. By pushing past assumptions with multiple “Whys,” Product Managers can distinguish between what users want and what they genuinely need.  Additionally – very often, the first ‘Why’  will not yield the complete answer.  For example:
• • User says: “We need a dashboard with more charts.”
  • PM asks Why #1: “Why do you need more charts?”
    → “So we can see more data at once.”
  • PM asks Why #2: “Why do you need to see more data at once?”
    → “Because our team struggles to spot trends quickly.”
  • PM asks Why #3: “Why is spotting trends quickly important?”
    → “Because we need to plan for our production and are not able to do so very well and not accounting for the seasonal shifts. Even with these charts we’ll probably just be able to make changes in a timely manner, if at all.”
  • 👉 At this point, the Product manager may start realizing: The real need isn’t “more charts.” It’s better visibility into trends and seasonality to plan for production – which appears to indicate that a forecasting or predictive decision support system may be the real need!

👉Tip # 4.Use Persona mapping to define the various types of Users who will use your product.

• Importance: This is crucial because there can be multiple user categories, and you may need to decide which ones to focus on. Especially for startups, analyzing current data to identify personas using the product offering, along with acquisition, conversion metrics, and potential, helps determine whether to target all personas or a specific one. Additionally, persona maps help you understand how to address each persona’s aspirations. For example, married users under 35 who live in metro areas and are salaried might be a key persona for your product. (This is just an example—the actual persona may be more detailed.)

👉Tip # 5. Use Journey Maps and other frame-works to understand the current business process, underlying core needs of the user.

• Importance: A journey map is an invaluable tool for comprehending the customer’s experience in the current or proposed business process. It enables us to gain unique insights by viewing the process from the customer’s perspective, which would otherwise not be possible. For example – during this exercise, we may discover that user-onboarding has a lot of friction and the product needs features to reduce this friction as part of the product goals, at a higher priority.
• Other frameworks: A Journey Map is just one of many frameworks. Depending on your situation and needs, you might use others, such as the ‘Five Whys’ technique, which involves probing deeper to uncover the user’s true needs, or the ‘Jobs-to-be-Done’ (JTBD) framework. Review these available frameworks and choose the one that best fits your specific situation.
• Do’s: Somewhere in this stage, relatively early on, it will be a great idea to review and fine-tune the problem-definition & scope ( aka ‘Product Goals’). This is important because without guiding Product Goal(s), it is very easy to get sidetracked which can lead to various issues later on, including the development of impractical or unnecessary products.

👉Tip # 6. Collect 3rd party , internal quantitative and qualitative data apart from one to one / group interviews , to build the business case.

• Importance: With the prevalence of big-data and specialized data teams, it is possible to get access to analysis or to perform the same yourself, on internal data available on existing customers, prospects etc. Similarly, third party data on demographics, even competitors may be available. As a product manager, it is important that you have the groundwork and analysis on such data ready to complement the data and feedback you are getting from stake-holders. This can be crucial to help build the business case for a solution; generate estimates, priorities and even product strategy. It can also useful in weighing requests for competing features through the lens of factual data and analysis.

👉Tip # 7. Once you’ve a perspective of the user’s needs , present it back to them based on your understanding & ask clarifying questions.

In the first stage of the discovery exercise, the Product manager is mostly listening, analyzing and trying to understand . However once he or she has enough data, it is very important to present back the consolidated view or analysis formed and take feedback where he /she may have mis-read the user’s needs.

• Do’s : Do use visual tools like mind-maps , data flow diagrams , relationship diagrams , architectural diagram to visually represent what you’ve understood of the requirements. Additionally, today we have rapid prototyping tools, so make full use of these and try to show a non-working prototype UX especially in case of products with high UX involvement.
• Identify bottlenecks or areas of improvements in advance and clarifying questions. Ask questions such as – ‘Is this understanding accurate ? / Would you like to add something we may have missed ?/ Does this view of the workflow seem correct etc. ?‘
• Don’ts: Don’t rush the feedback process, let them take time if they need to revert on certain things. Don’t forget to update your documentation, UX etc. based on this set of clarifying feedback.

👉Tip # 8. Discuss priorities, feasibility, and move the discussion towards consensus on solution alternatives – if the discovery exercise seems successful.

• Do’s: Remember that at the beginning stage of this exercise, we have cautioned against suggestion a solution or dismissing solutions based on cost, feasibility – but if the discovery exercise provided a clear and good understanding of the problem, leading to consideration of multiple solutions / options then during the closing stages, now you may start getting feedback from stake-holders, customers on what options / solution(s) makes the best sense.
• Don’t : Do not rush towards a consensus and ensure that stakeholder’s concerns are understood. As stated earlier, data and analysis will be your friend here, to help assess alternatives and priorities. Remember that this is an iterative process and may take more than one round of concluding discussions.

⭐What Happens Next  – after Product Discovery ?

The Discovery exercise (note that I am not calling it a phase , because this can be a shorter / recurring / iterative exercise in agile teams 🙂 ) provides the Product Manager key take-aways, action items or next steps to work on.

These could be UX requirements for the UX team, Non-Functional requirements for the solution architect to look into, or ‘Features’ which the Product manager will need to break down into Epics & Stories, & the basis for prioritizing these – which’ll help you develop a … wait for it…… yes….a Product Roadmap.

The key in this step is to keep regular check-points and coordinate regularly on progress. It’s equally important to prioritize and align ‘Features’ with the ‘Product goals’.

So what about you ? How do you do conduct User Requirements Discovery in your organization? Have you also found any of the above tips useful? Please don’t forget to share your own thoughts and experience in the Product Discovery process.

#management , #ProductSuccess, #ProductManagement , #ProductDiscovery, #UserResearch

This article was Originally authored and published in Linkedin.