Product Discovery is a term that’s often used in the world of product development, but what does it really mean? Is it something new, or is it just a different label for what we’ve always done? In this post, I’ll delve into the nuances of Product Discovery, explain why it’s critical to your product’s success, and share some real-world examples to help you understand its scope and impact.
What is Product Discovery?
Product Discovery encompasses all the work involved in planning for the future of your product. It’s about identifying what you need to do to make your product better, more valuable, and more appealing to your users. While it might seem similar to what we’ve always done, Product Discovery adds a layer of intentionality and scope that goes beyond traditional methods like Scrum’s refinement.
The Dual Nature of Product Discovery
Planning for the Future: Product Discovery involves researching, designing, and understanding what needs to be done before a product can be delivered. This might include market research, user feedback, or technical feasibility studies.
Uncovering the Unknown: Unlike traditional planning, Product Discovery also focuses on the unknowns—the potential opportunities or problems that haven’t yet been identified. This proactive approach ensures that you’re not just reacting to current needs but are also anticipating future demands.
Discovery vs. Refinement
In Scrum, we often talk about refinement, but Product Discovery is broader. While refinement is about breaking down and understanding specific items in the backlog, Product Discovery is about the bigger picture—identifying new opportunities, exploring uncharted territories, and setting strategic directions.
Why Product Discovery is Essential
So why is Product Discovery so important? Simply put, it’s about maximizing the value of your product by ensuring that you’re working on the right things, in the right way, and at the right time.
Strategic Direction and Goals
Every successful product starts with a clear vision and goals. Product Discovery helps you define what you’re trying to achieve as a business and how your product fits into that vision. It’s about setting a direction and then figuring out the steps you need to take to get there.
- Example: Think of the Azure DevOps team at Microsoft. At one point, they had over 90 teams working on a single product. To keep everything aligned, they set a high-level strategic direction. Each level of the organization then engaged in its own discovery process to figure out how to contribute to that overarching goal.
The Scale of Product Discovery
The scale of Product Discovery can vary depending on the size and complexity of your organization. For a small team, it might be a relatively straightforward process. But for a large organization, Product Discovery can be a massive undertaking, involving multiple teams and layers of decision-making.
Portfolio-Level Discovery: At a high level, organizations need to define their value propositions, set strategic goals, and decide on the initiatives that will drive progress toward those goals. This might involve market research, competitive analysis, and long-term planning.
Team-Level Discovery: Each team within the organization then takes those high-level goals and translates them into actionable plans. This involves figuring out what features to build, what user needs to address, and how to measure success.
Real-World Examples of Product Discovery
Let’s take a look at some real-world examples to see how Product Discovery works in practice.
The Azure DevOps Example
As mentioned earlier, the Azure DevOps team at Microsoft had to manage a massive product with multiple teams contributing to its development. They set a strategic direction at the portfolio level, and then each team engaged in discovery to figure out how to move the needle on their specific goals.
- What They Did: The teams conducted research, gathered feedback, and explored new ideas to enhance the product. This iterative process of discovery ensured that every team was aligned with the overall vision and contributed to the product’s success.
The Microsoft Creators Update
Another great example is Microsoft’s approach to product updates. They follow a season-based model, planning their product goals in six-month increments. One of their major initiatives was the Creators Update, aimed at increasing market share among creative professionals like artists, writers, and musicians.
How They Did It: Microsoft focused on enhancing tools and features that would appeal to creators. For example, they increased the pressure levels of their digital pens from 255 to 1024, improving the experience for artists using their devices. This required coordination across multiple teams, from hardware to software, all working together towards a common goal.
The Result: The Creators Update successfully expanded Microsoft’s market share in the creative space. But Product Discovery didn’t stop there. They continued to gather feedback and recognized the need for a follow-up update to address further opportunities and challenges.
The Broader Impact of Product Discovery
Product Discovery isn’t just about making better products—it’s about making better decisions. It’s about aligning your entire organization, from the C-suite to the development teams, around a shared vision and goals.
Expanding the Possibilities
One of the most powerful aspects of Product Discovery is that it opens up possibilities that you might not have considered otherwise. When you involve more people in the discovery process, you tap into a wider range of ideas and perspectives. This can lead to more innovative solutions and better outcomes for your product.
- Diversifying Ideas: By involving everyone in your organization in the discovery process, you generate more ideas for solving problems and identifying opportunities. This not only helps improve your product but also opens up new markets and capabilities.
The Need for Deliberate Focus
Despite its importance, Product Discovery is often underserved in organizations. Many teams are great at building solid products, but without deliberate focus and direction, those products might not achieve their full potential.
- Investment and Return: Companies invest in product development with the expectation of a return. If your product doesn’t deliver additional market share or opportunities, that investment may dry up. Product Discovery ensures that you’re always working towards goals that will provide a meaningful return on investment.
Final Thoughts
Product Discovery is not just a buzzword—it’s a critical process that can make or break your product’s success. Whether you’re working on a small team or a large organization, taking the time to engage in thorough Product Discovery will pay off in the long run.
- Remember:
Set clear strategic goals and align your teams around them.
Involve everyone in the discovery process to generate diverse ideas.
Keep an eye on the big picture, but don’t forget the details.
Continuously gather feedback and adjust your course as needed.
By embracing Product Discovery, you’re not just building a product—you’re building a future for your business. 🚀
What is product discovery and why is it different from what we’ve always done? Man, I would say it’s not different from what we’ve always done, but it also is different from what we’ve always done. So product discovery is all of the work that you do that’s about planning for the future, right?
So if in order for a team to deliver some piece of work, you need to do a bunch of research or you need to create some designs or, um, or whatevers, right? Another team has to do something before it gets to our team. All of that, from our perspective, is discovery work. That may be work for the other team, right? But from our perspective, it’s discovery work. It’s discovering this item. It’s making, um, ensuring that we understand that item as much as possible and not just focused on the items that we know we want.
Discovery also focuses on the items we don’t know we want. So how do we find the things that are going to enable our product to be better? That’s going to enhance our users’ experience. That’s going to, um, open up new markets, increase our user base. Um, those are all things that we would do as part of discovery.
Um, Scrum calls it refinement, right? Although I think refinement’s probably a little bit tighter scope than discovery. Discovery is a lot bigger. Um, but it’s something that we have always done. It’s just not always been explicit. It’s not always been something that we say, “This is that body of work.” Who’s accountable for organizing that body of work? And in the Scrum world, that would be the product owner, right? They’re accountable for maximizing the value of the work done in the product.
But in whatever process you’re using, somebody needs to be directing that. It’s not necessarily okay for there to be no direction. So part of discovery will be figuring out what your goals are, what your vision is, and what your goals are. What is it you’re trying to achieve as a business, or what is it that your product’s trying to achieve? Um, what direction are you going? And then what are the steps you want to try and take to get there?
And then figuring out what do you need to do in your product to get there. Um, a great example, I think, at scale is the Azure DevOps team. At least when I worked with them a few years ago, the scale of that team, I think they were up to 90 plus teams at one point working on this one big product. So that’s a lot of work to feed that engine that is delivering value. Those teams working together, hopefully highly effective teams, but teams.
So they set strategic direction at the high level, and then there’s a bunch of discovery that has to go on at that level. Like, where are we going? What are we doing? What are we trying to achieve? Right? Think of it like portfolio. What are your value propositions for your product? How do you think you’re going to be able to affect those? And then they come up with ideas through the structure. This is what we want to build and then send it to the next level down within that larger product organization and say, “This is what we’re trying to achieve. You go figure out what’s going to make it happen.”
So then discovery launches again at that level. What do we think? Perhaps this is Azure boards, right? We’re trying to help the business achieve this outcome. They’re trying to achieve. What do we think we can do to help make progress towards that goal or those goals, right? Um, and then they might have 20 teams working on that idea. So they would create their level, like, what is it we think we’re going to try and achieve? How do we want to move the needles?
Um, and then they’re going to give that to the teams below, and the teams below are going to be like, “Okay, here’s what we’re trying to achieve,” all the way up the chain, right? All the way up to the product vision. Um, what do we need to do to make progress towards those goals in that vision?
Actually, a really good example, I’ve got another example which is maybe more people have experience of, and at the holistic level, and that’s the Windows team or Microsoft as a whole across many products. Um, has a strategic goal for six months, right? They, um, Microsoft calls it the season. I don’t know if they call it this, right? But I, looking in, observing what they’re doing, many people call it the season-based model.
Um, so they have a six months in a season, and they’re looking out three seasons, current season plus two more, right? So that could be up to 18 months, but somewhere between six and 18 months, they’re looking out. And one of the things that they wanted to go after, the market shares that they wanted to go after as a business, um, from their consumer products was creators.
So there are people writing books, there are people drawing pictures, there are people making music on computers, right? We want to go after that group of people, that market share, and we want to increase our market share in that space. So they created this idea of the creators update. That’s kind of what they call it, right? That, again, they do a spring and a fall update across the board. That’s kind of like that cadence of the season-based model, the six months.
So within that six months, they’re overriding product goal, product focus across all of their products. Season focus is to, um, help creators create stuff. That’s that overarching thing. And then each team, each group, each product group, and then each team inside of that that works under that story is trying to figure out what can we do to help further that.
So I remember the, the, I don’t have one here, but the pen support folks in Microsoft moved from 255 pressure levels to 1024 pressure levels. That was one of the things they did. So that required the people who make the pen, the people who make the screens, um, the people who make the operating system, right, to all work together in order to work towards this idea of improving pen support.
And that was to enable artists and enable that. And then they have software that comes off that, and they create SDKs and all this thing so that other people can build products on top of that. That was one of the endeavors in that, and that was just for drawing on the screen or writing on the screen, right?
Um, that effort to all work together improved their market share, right, in the creator space. That’s what they were trying to do. But then they realized during, right, they’ve got their three, six months, three seasons planned out. They just finished the creators season, so their product is shipped. It’s everybody’s 950 million people using Windows, and I don’t know how many of them are creators, right? But they’re getting feedback and telemetry and, uh, getting all that stuff.
And then they realized that they needed another creators update because they didn’t quite move the needle as far as they would like. There was certain feedback, and then they’re going to do that again. All of that is product discovery. So it’s really big. It depends on the scale of your organization, right? How much, uh, how big the scope is. But that is the scope of product discovery that you and everyone in your organization should be focused on, from the lowest person doing the work all the way up through the business to whoever is in charge of that, whatever level you roll up to, right?
So that could be Azure DevOps rolling up to the head of Azure DevOps, um, but then it eventually rolls up to Satya, right? The CEO of the organization. And Satya has lots of products and lots of different parts of the business, from, uh, consumer-focused parts of the business to non-consumer-focused parts of the business, seven business-focused parts of the business.
So how do we enable and align all of these things so that we are an entity that’s all working together towards these common goals, towards these common outcomes? And that is part of product discovery because you deciding what your product needs isn’t necessarily going to create the best outcomes.
Because we’re narrowing the choices to what you can imagine. If we expand it out to include all of the people working on your product, we are diversifying and perhaps generating more ideas for how we can solve these problems in more interesting ways and help our customers even more and open out new markets and new capabilities and new ways of doing things.
And that, yeah, product discovery is huge. It’s huge, and it is very underserved in organizations. It’s not very deliberate in organizations. Um, and that’s one of the things, one of the reasons, uh, that there’s a lot of shift in focus in the market towards product. Many teams are good engineering teams. They’re good at building solid, usable, working product on a regular cadence.
Um, but if they’re not provided with focus and direction, they’re not going to go anywhere. If that focus and direction doesn’t provide additional market share, additional market opportunities, then the investment goes away, right? There’s only so long companies will invest in something that they don’t feel like they’re getting a return on.
So product discovery is all of those things that happen within the business in order for people to figure out what they’re going to go build.
