5 Key product discovery principles to keep in mind

Before we dive into what product discovery involves in a practical sense, it’s important to set out some fundamental principles to guide you on your journey. Because while every product manager has a different idea of the exact process and techniques that work best, doing product discovery right depends on truly understanding it.

For Sebastien Phlix, Product Manager at N26, this is an important principle in itself:

To give you some inspiration for principles to keep in mind, we asked experienced product managers from a range of companies to give us their thoughts. Over time, you’ll develop your own guiding mantras. But if you’re new to product discovery, these bits of advice can help you get started.

Since product discovery is always a step into the unknown, it’s natural to feel a little nervous when getting started. Laura Haines, Product Manager at Canva, thinks this feeling is essential:

One reason for this is that failure is often just around the corner. Product management veterans know that regardless of experience, your assumptions will get proved wrong by user feedback and behavior all the time—and that’s OK.

In fact, failing is more than OK. To a large extent, it’s what product discovery is all about. Failing helps you learn. Properly analyze each of your failures, and you’ll get closer and closer to a solution. Stay attached to your original idea, and you’ll get stuck in a rut.

Freddie Beesely, VP of Product at Attest, sees this as a crucial product discovery pitfall to avoid:

Instead, Freddie recommends “testing as many ideas as you can to find a winner.” The best product managers always listen to their users—not their ego.

The tech industry is famously fast-paced. Since the 90s, many new ways to iterate and deliver new features faster than ever have been invented. And as product development has become more agile, the expectations of company leads and stakeholders for fast progress has increased too.

But while proof of progress is often tied to shipping features, it’s crucial that you don’t fall into the trap of skipping or rushing product discovery to deliver faster. A new feature is much less likely to impact your company’s key metrics if you don’t spend enough time understanding the problem.

Even though this might seem obvious, Sebastien still thinks it happens far too often:

Of course, in an ideal world very few product managers would choose to skip product discovery. But external time constraints and pressure from above can force product teams into bad routines.

Luckily, there are ways to open up the time you need for product discovery without stretching deadlines. Sebastien recommends building an autonomous team to handle execution:

Arjen Harris, Head of Product at Maze, says it’s all about fine-tuning your product discovery process around the specific product you’re working on:

Taking smart actions like these will help you make the most of the time you have for product discovery—so you can be confident that new features will have the impact you want when it’s time to ship.

While product discovery is never an exact science—which is what makes it interesting—it often requires a scientific mindset. Forming solid hypotheses, running effective experiments, and analyzing data are just some of the key activities that can only be done successfully with a logical, unbiased approach.

In a similar way, it’s vital to avoid influencing participants towards certain ideas or outcomes during user interviews and usability testing. But at the same time, the more you can make your users forget that they’re being analyzed, the more they will feel comfortable with giving you open and honest answers.

Marc Davies, Product Lead at Oliva, thinks building rapport with users is super important:

By taking a relaxed, informal approach to conversations with users, you’ll be able to make the most of the time you have with them. Nadine Krishnamurthy-Spencer, Product Manager at We Are With You, agrees that while preparing a bank of non-leading questions is “absolutely key,” the best user interviews are the ones that flow naturally:

In many ways, the ultimate goal of product discovery is always validation. By the end of the process, you don’t just want to have a solution ready for development—you also want evidence to validate that it’s the right one for your users.

But to help you reach this final validation, you should look for more opportunities to validate your work along the way. Depending on the outcome, you might end up in a totally different place to where you thought you were heading—that’s what makes product discovery exciting.

The first thing you should validate is your initial assumption. Arjen has a story that demonstrates how important this is:

Arjen’s team immediately cancelled development of the feature to focus on areas where they knew they could add value. Not the takeaway they expected, but a valuable one.

Once you’ve validated your assumptions with user feedback, you could also consider validating the feedback too. When working on an internal tool for her colleagues, Nadine observed them to see if their words matched their behavior. It led to a real ‘a-ha!’ moment:

As a result, Nadine’s team radically changed strategy to fix other high-impact problems. The takeaway: always validate what your users are telling you with data from their actual behavior.

Every product team has its own way of working. Maybe your team focuses on delivering one feature or set of features before moving onto the next, or maybe different team members handle different stages of the product discovery and development journey.

So while breaking down product discovery as a step-by-step, linear chronological process is helpful for understanding it, in practice it never really has to end. The best product managers always stay close and connected to their customers, whatever stage they’re at. When we interviewed product discovery coach Teresa Torres, she told us that "a digital product is never done. So we want to make sure we're getting constant feedback from our customers about whether or not we're building the right things."

Pol Narbona, Product Manager at Canva, likes to have product discovery going on all the time:

Nadine agrees:

As long as you keep the prototypes that you test quick and simple, you could even have an entire team fully dedicated to doing product discovery all the time. This is a dream for some product managers—numerous people we interviewed for this guide see product discovery as the most interesting part of the job.

Diego Sanchez, Product Manager at Buffer, is a particularly big fan:

So whatever principles you take away from this chapter, perhaps the most important is very simple: enjoy the ride. Stay passionate about problem-solving and getting to know your users, and as Sebastien said at the start of this chapter: “the rest will follow easily.”