The Fountain Institute is an independent online school that teaches advanced UX & product skills.
What is Product Discovery?
What is product discovery?by Jeff Humble Dear Reader, So, there's this secret term that product leadership uses to describe your work behind your back. And today, I want you to be crystal clear on what it is. It's a word they use to describe it when you do extra research to ensure you're designing the best possible idea. It's a phase of work that you might call UX, but they call it something else. They call it "product discovery." What is Product Discovery?The term comes from consultant and author Marty Cagan [source]. It was invented in 2007 to help product managers understand that their real job is discovery, not delivery. Product discovery is the opposite of product delivery. It's deciding what should be built collaboratively (ideally) using whatever data you can gather or generate.
For designers, product delivery is designing the product, and product discovery is deciding what to design.
It's where you decide what problems are worth solving and which solutions are worth designing. Since it's a term that comes from product managers, the scope of work is bigger than you might be used to as a designer. When Marty coined the term in 2007, there was a perception that a product manager's job was to create requirements and tell everyone what to do. Sadly, some product managers still act like that in 2024. Some product organizations skip discovery altogether and make all the designers and developers deliver poorly vetted ideas. Product discovery is about letting the entire team vet ideas before assuming they will be 100% successful. Since the product team decides what gets built, this can be very good for designers, who would have more say in the process. What part of my work as a designer is discovery?This is a bit awkward, but um... If you're a UX designer, service designer, or a design researcher, all of it might be discovery. Your entire process might involve getting ideas ready for delivery, a.k.a. handing them off to UI and devs. Some things you might do in discovery:
These are product discovery activities because they help ensure that you are "building the right thing" (product discovery), not "building the thing right" (product delivery). Hopefully, you realize that product discovery is another word for the research that prepares us to deliver a well-designed experience. To learn more, check out the full article:
Source
Until next time, y'all! ✌️
|
The Fountain Institute
The Fountain Institute is an independent online school that teaches advanced UX & product skills.
Are you stuck in reactive mode? by Jeff Humble Dear Reader, Some designers spend their whole careers reacting to other people's moves. As a design manager, I remember being in this position. I had to brace myself every Monday morning for some radical change in company direction. We never knew what the new agenda would be, but we knew that it would throw our work into chaos. Sometimes, all it took was for the founder to read a single article to change the company agenda. When a competitor...
Why Your Portfolio Isn’t Working (and How to Fix It) By Hannah Baker Dear Reader, Let’s talk about a harsh truth: Your UX portfolio might be the least important thing in your job search. Yep, I said it. You spent hours making sure it showcases your best work. You structured your case studies just right. You ensured your problem statements, research insights, and solutions flowed together. And yet… hiring managers are ghosting you like a bad Hinge date. Well, the problem isn’t your...
Chasing Competitors Instead of User Needs by Jeff Humble Dear Reader, Have you ever had a CEO who was overly obsessed with beating the competition? I know I have. You may not have realized exactly how this can be toxic. So, I'd like to help you out with two case studies. Here is a tale of two companies and how they handled the competition. The first took a company-first approach while the second took a user-first approach. It goes like this... Company-First: The Rise & Fall of Google+ Google+...