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.
A goodbye and the story that goes with it By Hannah Baker Dear Reader, There's an idea I've been chasing for most of my working life, and I didn't know it. I want to tell you about it, and about something that happened a few years ago that I haven't talked about much publicly, but that belongs in this story. Some of you might already know this about me, but I used to work in education departments at museums. The thing that grabbed me in the museums was a shift that happened, away from the...
7 Ways Hiring is Evolving for Senior Designers by Jeff Humble Dear Reader, 2026 has been a wild ride for product designers, so we thought it might be worth checking in to see what's changing about design hiring. There has never been a better time to think outside the box with your career strategies. In this article, we give you a playbook from various experts where every piece of advice is from this year. Get comfortable with live problem-solving. Shipped, traceable work beats case studies....
5 More Signals about the Future of AI Interactions by Jeff Humble Dear Reader, The way we interact with AI is changing, and it fascinates me. How will we interact with AI in 2035? Signals give us a hint. What are signals? Signals = surprising examples from today that suggest where the future might end up. Last year, I did part 1, and now I want to share 5 more. Signal #1: Google built an AI-enabled mouse pointer from Google DeepMind This is a signal that I think will catch on fast. The Google...