The Discovery phase and why should you care about it...
Most businesses fall into two categories, they are either building a product or offering a service.
A lot of good companies miss out a vital phase when building products or services which is the discovery phase. It’s viewed as a waste of time, companies want to move quickly, they want to be ‘agile’ and figure it out as they go.
The problem with this, you always uncover something, a ‘gotcha’ moment, if you don't spend some time in discovery. Discovery is a way to reduce risk in what you want to build, or, a better way to view it - Discovery helps you understand how much risk is involved in what you want to build / launch.
Now if you are redesigning a service that a huge amount of the country will be using, you might want to spend a lot of time on the discovery, there is a lot at stake, reputation, loss of a vital service. However if you are building something much smaller, for a new audience perhaps, you might not have to spend weeks on this, the information may be easier to gather, there are lots of variables to consider.
The million dollar question to ponder - How much time is enough in discovery,? I would say it is really dependent on the risk involved in customer value, cost to build, reputation and size of opportunity.
The key areas to focus on are:-
Establish what your hypothesis is
Figure out the assumptions that you are making
Ask the right questions
Assess and refine
I’ve got into the weeds of this below….
Establish what your hypothesis is -
Determine what the problem is and how you might solve that with a product or service. With defining the problem, you will also need to work out who your customers are and what their needs are.
Figure out the assumptions that you are making -
You might have made an assumption about how a customer is going to use something. I can remember what feels like a century ago now, managing the Crossword product for The Guardian. We had a new piece of technology that was brilliant and was going to save us a lot of time to upload these crossword puzzles onto the website. However one key thing we hadn’t thought to ask, was how were our users actually using the crosswords. We made a huge assumption, they were doing them online. Wrong! They were printing them off from their computer, and there were issues when customers printed them off as there are SO many printer models and a lot of our audience were using the really old printer models.
Cue a huge uproar from our devoted crossword customers and a lot of testing and reworking in the background to get this working properly, so customers could print their digital crosswords on paper…sigh! It’s horrible learning so publicly from a mistake, but a valuable lesson there!
Ask the right questions -
Create a question bank so you don’t need to re-invent this later on down the line, and then customize it each time.
What don’t I know about this thing that I'm building / launching?
Do we have to follow a policy, any regulations?
What is the vision, goal and mission for this product or service?
What does the customer journey look like?
What stakeholders need to be involved?
What's my customer market research plan going to look like? And what questions will I be asking my customers?
How will I be reporting on this?
Is there a budget to pull in subject matter experts?
What are the needs of the customer?
What are the problems of the customer?
What possible solutions are we going to come up with to solve this?
Can we build a small test to see if that solves the problem for the user?
Assess and refine -
This is really about pulling all this information together and working out what the data is telling you. Do you have a product market fit? Or how will this service help a customer with their problem? Are you on the right track with what you are proposing to build or launch? Or do you need to make some adjustments to your hypothesis/solution?
In conclusion -
The point of this work upfront is to be able to speed you up when you get to the build part. Sometimes discoveries get abandoned as there is no product market fit, or the team spends too long on discovery and some other company has launched something that is far better/cheaper/sexier that the one you are positioning.
Now some people might be reading this and saying, that's all well and good for mid sized companies, or big corporations but what about me? The small business….I’d say it’s even more important, the risk, the time, the reputation and cost.
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