What is product discovery?
Product discovery is the most essential initial step you should take before launching the development of your application. This phase helps you receive a great product vision and cultivate a clear understanding of the customers’ needs by checking and comparing the solutions’ ideas with the actual market demand. Normally, it will take 4-6 weeks to conduct product discovery.
Why is product discovery important?
The product discovery process is crucial as it enables businesses to create products that are really important for the customers. Software product discovery services can lower confusion about the product concept ensuring that the right solution will be developed for the right people.
This initial phase of the software development life cycle will help you:
- know your target audience,
- estimate a work scope and create a roadmap for establishing a solid product,
- reduce production costs and avoid budget overruns,
- plan resources reasonably and know your team better,
- present a product to investors and partners before starting its development,
- determine whether the assumptions about the product are accurate,
- reveal and eliminate risks,
- speed up product development and get it quicker to the market, and
- improve the solution with data-based insights.
What are the key elements of product discovery?
To reveal the solution’s unique values and to ensure business competitiveness and success, the software product discovery process should embrace the following components.
Functional specification
The main goal of the functional specification is to outline the requirements the solution should meet regarding your business goals, define a volume of work, and give a clear idea of the future product. At this stage, the product’s expected capabilities, look, and interactions with end-users are described to developers.
The software development partner identifies the main actors, process stages, information flows, interactions, and exception conditions. If you fail to create a functional specification at the very beginning, you can face a risk of exceeding the budget and going over deadlines.
UX/UI design
As an indispensable part of the product team, designers are also involved in the product discovery process and responsible for creating a compelling and user-friendly design. By obtaining a completed design of your solution, you will have an initial view of its appearance and feel.
With the completed design of your future product, you will gain a profound understanding of its feel and look. Moreover, all the essential elements of your corporate identity will be shown in a compelling way. Engaging and user-friendly designs will ensure smooth communication with end-users and enhance your competitiveness.
A visual prototype
A prepared design can be turned into an interactive visual prototype to demonstrate how a final product will look to the customers. The prototype gives you the possibility to navigate through the software product and test its features as if you were utilizing a finished version. So, an interactive visual prototype lets you know if the design works.
Development roadmap
A product development roadmap outlines the project milestones helping you to oversee every step of the development process. This strategic plan facilitates internal work on the solution, streamlines communication with all actors, unveils changes and improvements, and prioritizes specific units of development.
The main product discovery stages
Three main phases listed below will help you understand how to conduct product discovery:
- decide on your product,
- create the look and feel of the product, and
- demonstrate a live demo.
What happens after product discovery?
As soon as the product discovery process is finished, the team may move to running prototype tests and collecting user feedback. They can also determine an MVP as an early version of a product helps validate the premise of a software solution and confirm hypotheses about market demands.
Finally, engineers proceed to the phase of creating a final product that deals with all technical aspects of the solution’s development, installation, configuration, and utilization.