Discovery Process

Successful products are built in test. The Discovery process is the initial phase that provides you with the necessary research in order to define your products and set yourself up for informative testing. To get to successful testing, you need good foundational research - quantitative and qualitative information - by which to design your user stories and, subsequently, your acceptance tests. The below notes are the main steps and considerations for how I ideally complete all Discovery phases and ensure a successful product.

Some companies come in with an understanding of the tentative product they want to build. This is not entirely a bad idea. The reason that a company has a product concept already is usually either 1. based on what they are hearing from their customers (qualitative primary research) or 2. new technologies in the market (showcasing capabilities). Once you figure out where the concepts are coming from, they can be useful.

Step 1: Define the Battleground

In order to make informed decisions about investment in a product, you need to know what environment or marketplace you are competing in as a company.

I. Define your Company

So, who are you as a company? Very succinctly, you need to be able to state who you are as a company, your value proposition. I try to limit these to a single sentence to ensure that I am as brief as possible, without over simplifying.

This step also involves identifying your key stakeholders. Identify who is critical to sign off on this product and ensure that are included in all future critical intersections of the product. They will assist you in defining and refocusing your product throughout the Discovery process, while also being those you need to manage closest.

II. Define your Market

Now that you can state who you are as a company, we need to define what the market space around you looks like. Your market can usually be summed up as the direct object of your value proposition. You will need to identify the relative size and density of the space that market, the major players, and relative competitors.

If the market is relatively small, take a look into why.

Additionally, if the market is smaller, I typically look at like markets to see if there are learnings or overlap that I can see from the related markets that may pose an issue for me.

III. Define your User

Markets typically define a major or largest share user.

I refer to those who will be using the product or service as users for a specific reason. When you refer to your target as customers, you subconsciously start to view them as something to be optimized and capitalized on. While this is true, viewing your users subconsciously as money bags will start to affect your interactions with them and can negatively impact your product development decisions. Users, as a term, denotes that there is an exchange of value based on the quality of product and service delivered. It creates a verbal, equal platform between company and customer that drives a mentality of iteration, equality, and care.

You serve users; you have customers.

IV. Define your Value

Once you know your users, you have to be able to define you specific value add to their lives. Clearly and succinctly define what the value you offer to your users is.

This value should be something that directly alleviates a pain point they experience on a regular basis in order for the value to be significant enough for users to change their current habits.

Step 2. Create Product Concepts

Only once you have defined the environment in which your product would be viewed in — a.k.a. the battleground — can you start to create informed product concepts. No doubt during the previous phase you started to come up with ideas that were prompted by your research. Now, you will need to solidify and validate those ideas.

I. Brainstorm

Take the ideas that you have come up with and pin them to a board, off to the side.

This is a typical brainstorm exercise as you would have in almost any project. Write out the main pain points of your user by user type underneath their persona names. Next, write out your value offering above the personas as a large over arching statement.

Create product ideas that specifically tie pain points to the value add and run. For brainstorming exercise ideas, check out thoughtbot. I like to vary it up from time to time, but their exercises are a solid place to start.

II. App Store Listing

In order to have a succinct view of each product offering, take each concept and write the app store listing for it. Write out the (1) main feature or service offered, (2) subsidiary, or 'nice-to-have' features, (3) and the marketing spin for value on each concept.

Writing each product out in this way will help you stay focused on what the offering is and not what it could be in the future.

III. Trial by Fire

Next, take all of the ideas and put them on sheets of paper or post it notes on the left side of your board. Make sure to note which personas they apply to. After erasing everything, start one by one trying to find out how each product will fail.

I usually call this the Titanic exercise. It is useful in understanding what the risk, value, and probability of market success is for each product idea. If you have a dark sense of humour, you'll love it.

IV. The Block

At this point, you should have a good understanding of what opportunities are out there, and the associated risks. It's time to start hacking away to the good stuff.

At this point, if you don't have a team behind you, it is imperative that you get outside input. Grab a couple friends, colleagues, etc. to sit down with you.

You want to go through and associate product concepts together and prioritizing them. When you prioritize, think about cost/benefit analysis of each product, how crowded the market is perceived, how many of your users you hit and how close it aligns to your value proposition.

Once you have a generally prioritized list, cut out anything that you could not reasonably do with two similar partners. You want a product that you can bring to market, brute force if necessary. Too many partners or too long of a built time will squander your enthusiasm and tank your project.

While it may be a good idea, it may be a good idea for IBM or Facebook — not you.

Step 3. Prototype

Usually I end up with three to four concepts at this time through elimination concepts, however, if you have more than that, think realistically about what you can afford in terms of time and finances to prototype and test. Personally, I have never seen a discovery that was able to test more than 6 concepts effectively.

I. Lean Mean Machine

Make sure that the prototype you create is the minimum investment needed to properly test the product concept. No feature should be overlooked, but they should also not be heavily developed. You don't want to heavily invest in each prototype as they will require a fair amount of revisions after the first test. Investing too heavily on the first pass expends too many resources, either emotionally or materially.

Make your prototype just enough in breadth and depth to illicit sufficient testing data and no more.

II. Scalability

Think about each feature's scalability as you develop the prototype. Features should be able to be scaled up as the product developed. Sometimes features are fantastic ideas that cannot be profitable on a larger scale, while others cannot be executed without a large enough initial buy-in. Ensure you are thinking through this with each feature developed for the product.

III. Your Users; Your Jury

Users will be the one who define the success of your product. In order to ensure success later on, you must write user stories to scope the features of your product. These will be used to refocus the team on what the product is, is not, and frame the testing of your product for quality assurance.

When you write your user stories, immediately write your acceptance tests.

Step 4. Concept Testing

Finally, this gets really fun. While building is amazing and life fulfilling, seeing your little product concept grow up, and eat the other product concepts like a cannibalistic hound of the Baskervilles is amazing.

The objective of this step is to determine what concept you will turn into a real product.

Design a test that is appropriate for the product that you are testing. There are a plethora of different testing types and methods available to you, that you can see on the appendix of this post.

I. Testing Objectives

When determining the type of test, think first about what you need to learn from the test. In feature priority order, think about what you want to and need to learn from the test. Write these out in a list and then look at research testing methods that best match the objectives you need to accomplish.

Once determining testing objectives and testing type, you can determine the necessary script for testing including your questions matrix. You can easily find template scripts online to frame the beginning and ending of your test. The questions will comprise the meat of the test and should address everything you want to learn from the test.

II. Non-biased approached

While drafting your questions it is imperative that you do your absolute best to not have the questions lead the subjects in any way. I find it useful to have a non-invested person read my questions matrix and see if they feel guided in anyway.

This is also important to keep in mind when administering the test. Your tone and inflection can also guide users, so practice keeping a non-judgemental tone.

III. N-finite learnings

Ensuring that you have an appropriate sample size for your test is key. Too large is untenable, and too small is statistically unsound. The focus should be a respective cut of the target market to ensure you hit a smattering of each of the personas.

Step 5. Concept Revisions

Once you come out of concept testing, you usually have a front-runner concept that you will need to revise. In determining your revisions, ensure that you prioritize the changes you want to make. You cannot be everything to everyone, so revise the concept by reviewing edits against the previously created value proposition and user pain points.

It also during this time that you will create a fully testable minimum viable product (MVP). In completing revisions, ensure that you perform proper quality testing before you head into product testing.

Step 6. Product Testing

Product testing is mean to validate the product features and functions. At this time, you are invested in the product and will be bringing it to market - do not lose steam.

Pull up with your team to review the goals of the product, what you have accomplished so far, and set specific check-ins to create smaller, manageable roll-outs of the product.

I. Alpha

Alpha testing is internal testing that allows the stakeholders to sign off on the product. By reviewing the product with your stakeholders, you empower them as part of the process and roll-out will be more smooth.

Ensure that during this review, you refocus on the user stories and acceptance tests you wrote previously.

II. Limited Release Beta

Limited release beta involves testing with a small exemplary portion of your user base. Similar to the original concept testing, these user types should be able to utilize your product as if it were in the market, without your careful hand to guide them the whole way.

Note their challenges and mark any revisions as required based on the test.

III. Open Beta

Open beta allows a larger sense of self-selected users and company selected users. You break out Beta into a minimum of two rounds in order to ensure that issues are caught early with a small user base. Note their challenges and mark any revisions as required based on the test.

Step. 7. Launch

Launch time is when you show your face to the public. As you look down the barrel at the launch date, pull-up, refocus and ensure that you have everything covered off on before you make your debut.

1. Soft Launch

A soft launch is useful to allow for any system errors to be found and corrected before the system is hit hard by users.

2. Promoted Launch

The one, the only, the game defining moment where your heart stops and you're fearful and excited at the same time. You go live, on schedule, with promotion - and this is key. You must promote your product well in advance of your launch with a clearly defined public launch date in order to be successful.

That's it in a nutshell. Of course, there are additional, more in depth items, but this will provide you with a well defined action list and set you up for success.