Product discovery
Product discovery is the work of deciding what to build and why, by validating that a proposed solution is valuable, usable, feasible and viable before committing significant engineering effort to it.
Also known as Discovery
What is the difference between discovery and delivery?
Discovery decides what to build and whether it is worth building; delivery builds and ships it. Discovery reduces the risk of delivering the wrong thing, which is the most expensive kind of waste.
What questions does product discovery answer?
Do customers have this problem, and how badly? Will they use and value our solution? Can we build it? Does it work for the business? Marty Cagan frames these as value, usability, feasibility and viability risks.
How does customer evidence fit into discovery?
Discovery runs on evidence. The faster a team can pull relevant customer signal, from past tickets to fresh interviews, the faster it can validate or kill an idea before it reaches the backlog.
Put it into practice
Product discovery, in brief
Product discovery is the work of deciding what to build and why, validating that a solution is valuable, usable, feasible and viable before committing significant engineering effort.
Discovery decides what to build and whether it is worth building; delivery builds and ships it. Discovery exists to avoid the expensive waste of delivering the wrong thing.
Related terms
- Continuous discoveryContinuous discovery is the practice of maintaining a regular, ongoing habit of talking to customers and testing ideas throughout product development, rather than doing research only in occasional big projects.Read more
- Jobs to be doneJobs to be done (JTBD) is a framework that describes products in terms of the progress a customer is trying to make in a given situation, rather than the customer's attributes or the product's features.Read more
- Customer insightA customer insight is a non-obvious, evidence-backed understanding of customer behaviour or motivation that can change a decision, distinct from a raw data point or a single piece of feedback.Read more
- Product-market fitProduct-market fit is the point at which a product satisfies a strong market demand so well that customers adopt, stay and recommend it, and demand begins to pull the business forward.Read more
- Feature prioritisationFeature prioritisation is deciding which product changes to build first, by weighing how many customers a problem affects and how badly against what it would cost to solve.Read more
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