The hardest part of building a great product is not the engineering or design. The hardest part is discovering what exactly the products need to be, just before you build anything. This is where you need to do market research, define personas and develop prototypes before moving forward with development and design. It’s not enough to have a great idea; you need to develop it based on your research.
Product discovery is a process of validating a product idea. The first step in this process is to validate the idea.
Validating an idea means testing it out with customers and getting feedback from them about whether or not they think the product will be useful for them, how much they’d pay for it, what features they’d like added to it, etc.
As you can see, it is not enough to have a great idea. You need to develop it based on your research. The product should be based on the research, and vice-versa.
Building a product is the easy part; discovering what exactly the products need to be, just before you build anything is the trickier part.
As a product manager, it’s your responsibility to make sure that you create something people want. To do this, you have to be able to clearly identify what the customer wants and needs from your product. But how do you discover these things? How do you know if someone is actually going to use or love your digital product? In short, how does one “get ahead of the curve” when it comes to building an amazing digital product?
The answer lies in a process called interaction design research (IDR). IDR helps companies understand their users better by conducting research on potential customers and creating prototypes that demonstrate solutions for whatever problems those users might have. While there are many different ways of conducting IDR, user interviews are one of the most common ones used today because they provide businesses with valuable insights into how real people interact with products and features.
To make matters even more complicated, you need to make sure that what you are building is something that people can’t wait to use.
That means your team has to be intentional in its approach and actively participate in the product discovery process.
The first step of this process is user research—it’s crucial that everyone on the team understand who their users are, what they want, and how they go about getting it. This is where doing some research on target segments can really pay off; it helps guide the development process by giving stakeholders a clearer understanding of the needs they should be addressing with their products.
Whether you opt for user interviews or online surveys (or both), asking questions about what your customers want from your product will help shape its design and development strategy from an informed perspective. The more specific your questions are about who uses it for what purpose, where or when do they do so and why would they prefer one type over another type of product. The better equipped you will be at focusing efforts on building exactly what users need most urgently now rather than just whatever comes up next!
And doing all this for most people seems like an impossible feat. But it does not have to be.
So how do you make sure your product discovery process is successful? First, let’s talk about what a good product discovery process looks like.
- It is highly iterative
- The entire team should be involved in the process; they will have a better understanding of what customers want and need
- It should be repeated until you are confident that you have built something that people want to use
The first step in this process is conceptualization: defining your problem statement and building personas around who will use the product. The second step is forming hypotheses about how people might solve their problems through digital products (and testing them). The third step would be building prototypes based on these hypotheses so that users can experience them for themselves and give feedback on how well they worked or didn’t work for them. Once these prototypes are tested with real users, there may still be changes needed before launching the final version—or maybe not! Either way, documenting everything along the way will help ensure everyone stays on track throughout development.
Good software engineers and designers, designers and front-end engineers, and user researchers can help you bridge the gap between the things you want to build and the things your users want.
There’s no way around it: building a successful digital product is hard and takes time. You’ll have to learn how to manage your time, find the right people for your team, and get really good at communicating with users. But if you can do all these things well enough, you will end up with a great digital product that serves your users’ needs—and makes them happy.
In this case study from our partner Cognizant Digital Studio™, we see how they used Lean Startup principles to create an MVP for their client’s new digital product. The goal was to test out their ideas and find out if users would be interested in buying or using them before spending too much money developing it further.
We can help those teams conduct research to find out if the product is needed in the first place (validating their idea), then create roadmaps on how they should proceed with development, design, and research.
- Validation means proving that something is useful or works as desired.
- Think about validation as a hypothesis testing process where you are trying to test whether customers will want your product idea. You can think of it as asking yourself: “If I build this product, will users buy it?” For example, before launching UberCab in 2009, its founders spent a lot of time discussing and validating the idea with potential customers until they felt confident that there was an actual need for such a service.
Conclusion
So there you have it! We hope that we have helped you understand what makes a great digital product and how to go about creating one.
