Product Discovery is a pre-development phase to establish overall direction a focus gives way to just-in-time discovery feeding agile delivery

Product discovery is a method of deeply understanding your customers to develop products that perfectly suit their needs. It’s a critical stage in the product development process because if companies do not accurately prove or disprove their assumptions about their customers, they may waste time building products that nobody needs. Product analytics software is key to product discovery.

The product discovery process is important because it helps teams build products that are vital to their customers, not simply nice to have. A necessary product is one that solves such a deep and genuine need for the customer that they feel unable to live without it. Examples range from Google search to smartphones to duct tape. Many of them evolve into verbs, as in “Google it.” The advantage here is obvious: Necessities enjoy higher demand and greater success. 

The difference between a necessity and a ‘nice to have’ product is effective product discovery. When companies fail at this, it’s often because “they weren’t thorough enough in their customer research and based their product on assumptions not backed by evidence,” says Josh Decker-Trinidad, a product designer and researcher at General Assembly.