7 Major product discovery mistakes (and how to avoid them)

To truly put your user at the center of your product and build solutions that speak their language, you need to not only ask what they’re thinking, but learn how to think like them.

This is where product discovery comes in.

While there’s no single best path to conducting user research and getting results, there are some common product discovery mishaps you and your team should steer clear of.

We spoke to Phoebe Dyloco, Research Lead at Asana, and Dave Martin, Product Leader Coach at Right to Left, who shared common product discovery mistakes they’ve made themselves or seen most teams make—plus, most importantly, how to avoid them.

It’s true that you need to talk to potential users before developing new products, but centering all product discovery efforts at the beginning of the product development process is a common mistake, and can lead to:

“Leaders should make their teams see the importance of conducting experiments every week, while building software at the same time,” explains Dave Martin, Product Leader Coach and Founder of Right to Left. Spend time with your team reading about continuous product discovery, and start reframing your approach: think of research as something that happens while you work on the product and not necessarily so you can work on the product.

Conducting continuous research doesn't mean embarking on an arduous research project every time—it can also be about conducting competitor research, regular pulse surveys, or reviewing previous user data.

Phoebe Dyloco, Research Lead at Asana, shares the process she follows when conducting research:

If you’re concerned about resources and budget, remember you can always revisit existing data to narrow down what new insights you need, and scale your UX research plan according to available resources.

Another all-too-common mistake is leaving other departments out of the product discovery process, or thinking each team should conduct their own research when needed.

Phoebe comes from a design background and explains: “I used to connect dots between research insights and design changes to our product. Now specializing in research, I realize one of the hardest parts of the job is making sure the insights are actionable and clear enough for design ideation.”

Conducting research in silos is risky because biases, mistakes, and conflicting results may appear and repeat across teams. When different teams conduct research individually, you risk:

Research must be planned in teams, even if each team will conduct separate studies. And above all, decisions should revolve around how it helps the user.

“Having a cross-functional team allows us to deliver more effective solutions that actually solve customers’ real problems,” says Dave. He sees businesses spend millions of dollars on product development every year, while the majority of that work is wasted on products that are rarely used.

All studies should be carefully planned, serve a specific purpose, hold teams accountable, and be ethical and aligned with business priorities.

To avoid doubling efforts, you can involve people from different departments in user interviews and research—or at least when defining the strategy, planning, or doing data analysis. This means including people from development, design, product, and even sales and marketing so they know how to speak to users in a way that matters to them.

If you’re unbelievably lucky, you might launch a product that successfully solves your customers’ problems without research, but that’s a one-in-a-million gamble which is unlikely to pay off.

Not doing any product discovery is taking a shot in the dark, but it’s also a mistake to use just one research method. “It’ll give you poor insights compared to using a good mix [of methods],” explains Dave. That’s because having a variety of quantitative and qualitative results obtained through different studies provides context, and confirms your insights.

There are many reasons teams only rely on one product discovery technique or avoid research altogether:

The solution to this issue is quite straightforward, but not necessarily easy: get people on board, so you can do more research. It’s your responsibility to get stakeholders to see the value behind research—making user-centric products and building apps people really want to use and share.

Talk to them about implementing an agile approach to iterate on the product based on user insights. You can also come up with a cross-functional discovery team to build alignment and convey the importance of letting users guide the decision-making.

We know that recruiting high-quality participants can be challenging. Once you find a group of responsive people, it’s common to want them to participate all of the time—but doing so can lead to limited and biased insights.

Your participant pool should be an accurate representation of your audience, which means they’ll naturally have things in common—but you want to avoid getting identical participants, or restricting yourself to recruiting participants who only match your ideal target user.

Conducting product discovery with an identical group of people can lead to:

First, you need to really understand your target user personas. Then, you can look for test participants that embody those characteristics.

For example, if you’re launching a new feature on a notes-sharing app for college students, but realize it’s also being used by high school attendees, get a mix of both users.

Be careful not to take individual feedback as the sole truth. “I check whether the person’s feedback is representative of the majority or whether there was an extraneous factor that wasn’t accounted for and may have influenced study results—like a participant that’s unfamiliar with the testing format,” explains Phoebe.

This is one of the most tricky mistakes to overcome because cognitive biases are mostly unconscious. They appear in all aspects of life: it’s actually your brain trying to help you make decisions faster, but it can lead to misinformed decisions or assumptions.

Some of the things biases can infiltrate during research include:

It’s crucial to get more people involved in the discovery process to have higher chances of spotting potential biases. Interpreting the results right is also important—avoid taking one user comment as the sole truth, or conducting analysis solo. Instead use a product discovery tool that analyzes the responses for you, and gives you a digestible data report.

Being aware of how to avoid cognitive biases is the first step. “When you're biased you start to use product discovery to validate your thinking rather than using it to prove you're wrong,” explains Dave. “The real job of user research is to prove why users shouldn't buy your products.”

Practice reducing cognitive biases by:

Expanding on biases, you should always conduct product research to find problems, rather than validate your assumptions. “One of the biggest mistakes a team can make is thinking that research can be used as a mechanism to validate assumptions about the solution space, problem, or user,” explains Phoebe.

While evaluative research does validate ideas, Phoebe differentiates assumptions from research hypotheses, which are rooted in data or previous qualitative research.

Using product discovery to validate ideas can happen when you confuse research questions with questions you ask during research (a.k.a interview questions). Research questions relate to your research objectives and goals—they look like this: ‘Do users like this feature?’ or ‘How bad is the user’s problem?’.

As Phoebe explains: “Research questions help us understand what we want to get out of the study and are used internally. Whereas interview questions are what we ask our users and ladder up to answering our research questions.”

Asking a research question during an interview such as ‘Do you like this feature?’, reduces the chances of seeing what they do and how they behave with your product. Instead, you’re relying on what they say, which might not be accurate or honest.

For example, let’s say you’ve developed a new feature that allows people to take pictures of receipts directly from your expense reporting app. If you ask people if they like the feature instead of observing how they use your app, you might miss out on their real pain point, e.g. they’re trying to add notes to reports but can’t.

Trying to validate or debunk an assumption can cause you to:

Approach research sessions with an open mind and try to become conscious of your cognitive biases. Review your study’s data but also pay attention to how your users act, and why they followed a certain approach. For example, observations and open-ended questions help you get the full story of what your time on task or the number of clicks usability metrics are trying to tell you.

“In product discovery, we talk about validation quite a lot,” says Dave. “We're borrowing this [concept] from the scientific method and that’s not how science works. The whole point is about having a hypothesis and using experimentation to prove it wrong,” he explains.

Product discovery should happen continuously throughout the product lifecycle, but that doesn’t mean you should go and talk to users without a clear vision or intention. Your research goals should be aligned with the product strategy and business objectives. Lacking a clear vision with product discovery can:

Writing a product discovery framework or strategy will help align your team so they know exactly why they’re conducting research. It’s your responsibility to communicate the ‘why’ behind tasks and get your team working from the same page. Remember to focus on the end goal and outcome (e.g. solving X problem for your users) instead of specific features, as those ideas might change over time.

Dave explains: “When we design the product in the boardroom, instead of using a cross-functional team that’s working with real users, and start talking about what specific features we need, instead of the outcome we’re trying to achieve, designers and engineers can only add 50% of their value—because we’ve done 50% of the job for them.”

To build the right product for your users, you need to get better at gathering valuable insights from them. You need a research strategy which builds discovery into your process, and those insights into your design and development.

If you’re looking for ways to overcome most of these mistakes, you can utilize a product discovery tool, revisit your product discovery roadmap or focus on building cross-functional research teams. Other tips include asking open-ended questions and knowing the why behind each user touchpoint.

To conduct continuous research without breaking the bank or spending loads of time creating the test and analyzing results, consider Maze. Make the most of research, with 50+ test templates and access to a panel of high-quality participants so you can create and conduct studies in hours.