The Art of Product Discovery - & Request of PtP Readers!
As a product management, what are the different tools of discovery at my disposal to get a leg up on the competition.
EPIC: Mastering Product Management
Discovery, or the process of learning the details current process or tool, is the first step where all great products are born.
Simplified, discovery = research. There are infinite methods and infinite areas of focus in which you may find yourself performing it. It’s also during discovery that you, as a product manager, formulate your hypothesis of what has to be built.
Product Discovery is what separates the good PMs from the great.
The process extends well beyond the product as well. Knowing where to focus your research is the critical ingredient for any endeavor. I showed a real-life example of such previously how I would approach in the context of interview prep in Case Study - Collecting Competitive Intelligence for a Product Manager Interview
In the context of actually executing as a product manager, some areas you may have to perform discovery are
Identifying what the new products you should be building are
Identifying the workflow you should be addressing to deliver value in the product you started to build
Prioritizing what elements of the potential workflow you're attempting to build are must-haves
Identifying the specific features you need in your roadmap
Defining the specs of a feature known to be needed - what must it do
The functionality and positioning of the products that compete with your product, so you don’t get blinded by the enemy
3rd party tools/platforms/data sources that could bring compounding value to your product and users
New technologies that should be adopted into your product to deliver greater business value to the users
This is not a comprehensive list of means of discovery. Discovery is infinite in nature.
Conducting Discovery as a Product Manager
As a Product Manager, a major part of the job is delivering value to others in exchange for insight that can improve your product. You should be thinking of all your interactions, internal AND external, as a quid pro quo. You should be in the business to doll out favors in the form of roadmap prioritization to those who can help you figure out what you need to about a feature fast.
You also need to know how important someone is to your product’s bottom line, and the more valuable they are, the high the stakes are to engage them. Think, the lease important person would be the CS Team help desk who fields customer support calls. Most important is the CEO of your most valuable client. It’s a spectrum, and you should always work your way up from the lowest stakes to high stakes.
Working Your Way up the Discovery Value Chain
Discovery with an Internal SME
The first thing you need to do when you are hired as the new product manager at a company is to find the internal subject matter experts who know your users best. Once identified, you need to charm these folks - they will be who direct tools in your success. Figure out what they like, what their motivations are, and anything else you can to win them over. This is a political game. Ask them about their kids & learn about their favorite sports team. Most importantly, figure out what they need to look good to their boss - and help them achieve such.
Why is this of critical importance? At every stage of developing your product, you will have to make a decision about a feature that will change the experience of the end user. You need people with insight into the problem you’re trying to solve- ideally in real-time - who can answer questions about your users to inform the product.
A crude example -If I’m building software to manage the feed schedule for Hairless Cat owners, and I have to figure out how many hairless cats one of my target users typically owns - who can I message in my company that would know the answer? Let’s say I’m mid-sprint, and I have to answer a question because my developer actively working on the feature, and telling me they’ll code differently if users could have 10+ cats. I don’t have time to waste to get that answer. These internal subject matter experts are my first line of defense, and who I turn to when I need an answer fast.
Find the right knowledgable person, and you can ride their insight to a promotion (That’s what I do 😁).
In exchange, you build features to their specs and prioritize what they want to see in the product. Quid pro quo.
External & Beta Users Who Trust You
These types of contacts will take more time & effort to cultivate. Finding them, however, are essential for your discovery needs. The best way I’ve done this is by recruiting customers to be part of your “Beta” launch of a new product. Typically, these types of companies and clients are open to getting experimental and being the first to use your software. In exchange for going on the adventure with you, they get more of a say in the roadmap and (often) financial incentive. Ultimately, you want someone who thinks of themselves a sort of “Techie”. They’ll begin to open up to you more and more as you gradually adopt their ideas for your product.
With these types of users, it is important to have and maintain credibility. I would not go in completely cold and ask them questions about a potential feature if I’m complicated and clueless about the flow. Going in blind will cause them to doubt you, and piss off your internal team members who also work with this client. I’ll engage my beta users after I have a working hypothesis built from speaking with my internal SME. Often, it’s my internal SMEs who will put me in contact with them when they do not know the answer.
An alternative approach is to take all your Beta Users, and engage them together in a macro meeting at a regular interview in the form of a “Client Advisory Council”. I then have my questions documented so I can ask rapid-fire when this meeting comes around. on the calendar.
With these types of customers, as I build a better relationship, I will personally email them when a new feature is released that I think they’ll care about. They can give me immediate qualitative feedback in addition to any product analytics I may be tracking.
BIG FISH CLIENTS
At a certain point, particularly if you’re playing in the B2B1 big leagues, you’ll be engaging the executives of your biggest clients for your product/features. This would typically be around product launches, and doing so is a combination of “Making sure you actually hit the mark” and “Showing you top clients you will evolve”. Part Marketing, part QA if you will.
With these types of engagements, the goal is to have your designs pretty damn mature. I’m walking in with an agenda and trying to get these executives to buy into our vision. This is not an “Ooh, would be fun to hear what they have to say” situation. It’s an all-hands on deck, “Let’s make sure we don’t fuck this up.”
These types of engagements should not be conducted in a vacuum. Typically I’ll be working with other team leads in my company to assure we are completely buttoned up when we meet. We want to learn exactly what these types of contacts need to either start or continue doing business with us. These are the type of meetings where your team’s execs may be sitting in on just in case. The Stakes are high, so you better not be messing around.
Quantitate Product Discovery
There also exist many executing discoveries that do not rely on personal contact with an individual. This is typically when you need specific data points to inform a decision to be made. This process deserves its own dedicated post at some point, but a few useful ways you can capture this data are:
Embedded client-side2 Product Analytics Tools: Used to measure feature clicks and page visits saved against your user’s meta-data
Server Side3 data Pull: the above analytics tools typically grab behavior on the user’s browser. To get the data input and saved on your servers, you’ll access those either directly from prod data tables, or a data warehouse-like environment. Most of the time, you’ll have to go through an engineering or analytics team to get this data.
Survey your clients: This can be done either in the software itself or separately via email. It’s cruder than looking at usage data, but the insights can be great. A very standardized process for this that is the gold standard in the industry is the NPS Score4
CALL TO ACTION: Help me improve Pivot to Product!
To actually practice what I preach, I want some feedback from you, my dear readers!
With an ever-growing list of subscribers, it’s high time I start engaging you all directly.
I’d like to learn more about who you are, what you like, and what you’d like to see out of this substack in the Future
How to respond? Please take 2 minutes to fill out the following survey. This is your chance - I will directly incorporate articles based on this feedback.
Do not take this opportunity lightly.
Pivot to Product User Feedback Intake
Got a product resume you need to up-level? I’ll review your resume, then talk tactics on a call.
Are you struggling with a product problem today? I’ll hop on a call and help you put forth the game plan to solve your issues.
B2B: Business to Business - A company whose product is sold to other companies, as opposed to individuals:
Client Side: A software product as is loaded in the browser of the user - all UI development occurs here
Server Side: The data saved in your internal company servers - this can be dollars, metrics, or anything else that is calculated or stored for future use.
NPS Scored: Net Promoter Score - an industry standard way to calculted the snetmient of your users - see What is NPS? Your ultimate guide to Net Promoter Score