8 Product discovery methods for user-aligned product development

In this guide, we’ve talked about how product teams should approach research, what processes to follow, and the key principles to product discovery.

Now, we’ll look at the best product discovery methods to use at each stage of your workflow. Of course, there are tons of different techniques to choose from—the ones you opt for depend on your research objectives, business resources, and product strategy. Let’s get started.

The main steps to product discovery are all anchored in getting to know your users: understanding what problems they have, how they'd like them solved, and evaluating how your product achieves this.

This research can inform early product concepts and result in launching a new product or feature—but isn’t necessarily limited to this. Continuous product discovery happens throughout the product lifecycle—it doesn’t end when you launch your product. Instead, the process starts over or jumps between phases depending on your research needs. This way, your product is informed by genuine user insights continuously, every step of the way.

In chapter one, we covered the four steps of the product discovery process in detail. Let’s do a quick recap:

To help you manage each step of the product discovery process, we’ve got eight recommended techniques for your consideration—plus expert advice for how to use them. These will inform how you gather insights and make data-informed decisions throughout each phase.

Check out the table below for an overview of each method, then we’ll go into detail on:

The simplest way to find out what your customers need is to ask them directly. With customer interviews, you can do just this and also ask follow-up questions and gather context in real-time.

Unlike other product discovery methodologies that provide quantitative data, customer interviews offer qualitative results, letting you understand customers’ motivations and struggles. For example, learn what your users’ day-to-day looks like, the language they use, and the things they value.

The downside of customer interviews is that they take time to organize, conduct, rewatch, and take notes. If you’re providing an incentive or interviewing in-person, it can also get expensive. Once you start speaking to a customer, it’s vital to make the most of this time.

Here are some quick tips for running interviews:

If you found speaking to certain users particularly useful, don’t be afraid to reach out to them again. “I remember we met with one customer probably every two weeks,” explains Diego Sanchez, Senior Product Manager at Buffer, who shared that he likes to form a core group of users to guide product development. “They really helped us shape our early assumptions.”

Use customer interviews during the learn and understand phase of the product discovery process. However, conducting interviews to learn more about the user and understand them better can happen at any stage of the product lifecycle. This means you can conduct interviews:

Quantitative data coming from product analytics is often used to measure performance after launch. However, it can also provide inspiration for prioritizing new products, features, and changes—and inform decisions throughout the lifecycle. By delving into product analytics, you can validate what customers are saying in interviews or surveys with quantitative metrics about how they interact and use your product.

For example, let’s say you have a social media app that allows users to edit and upload pictures. During interviews, users tell you they use a different app for editing their photos. You can compare that insight to data by checking the percentage of users that use editing features. If you see that the results aren’t representative, then you might focus on improving something else instead.

When you build user-centric products, you need to make decisions based on user data to avoid being influenced by cognitive biases, or assuming what’s best for your users without having clear data. “If you don't have analytics in your product, add them ASAP and start using data to help inform your product decisions,” emphasizes Sam Tardif, Senior Engineering Manager at Atlassian. “Otherwise you're making important decisions in the dark.”

Use analytics at all stages of product discovery. You should look at your data to inform decisions as you:

Learning how users feel about your product has a lot to do with the options they have. That’s why you should take a close look at the market and find gaps in the solutions currently available.

For example, Meta is great at conducting continuous competitor analysis. Every time a new social media app gains popularity, they find out exactly what its users are enjoying from the other app and develop a similar feature—like when people started sharing TikTok videos on Instagram, so Meta launched Instagram Reels.

Competitor analysis also lets you dig deep into the problem you’re trying to solve. Remember that your competitors have gone through product discovery themselves, and their solution is a reflection of what they learned. So even if you’re already broadly aware of what’s out there, get truly familiar with their product, and evaluate it from a user’s perspective.

Create a free account, analyze user journeys, and take screenshots. Once you’ve done this with a few competitors, you can build up a map of strengths, weaknesses, and feature lists of your competitors. Use this to spot gaps in what’s available on the market. Borrow what works and conduct further research to develop a solution that fixes what doesn’t.

Competitor analysis is formally conducted during the learn and understand stage of product discovery. This can happen at any phase of the product lifecycle, for example to:

This method helps you reach the root cause of problems by asking ‘why’ five times. It’ll help you funnel down to the real problem, and develop a hypothesis that can be tackled in a holistic way, rather than fulfilling individual feature requests without a clear overall product vision.

Your customers will give you unique insights into specific features that are missing from your product, but they can’t tell you the best solution—that’s a job for your design team. The search for a solution starts with reframing the problem.

For example, let’s say your customers are requesting a feature to assign tasks to their team members:

From a minor feature request, your product team can reach a much more important question to answer: would a suite of collaboration features complete your product? This could form the basis of a good hypothesis—and might even lead to a whole new part of your product being developed.

Use this method during the decide and define stage to get closer to a hypothesis and problem statement that you can further test through other methods. Implement this every time you prioritize features, make changes, or think about what’s truly important to your user.

Brainstorming is a straightforward, tried-and-tested way to come up with ideas. Invite your team and key stakeholders to a call or in-person meetup, communicate the session’s objective, and mention the problem you’re looking to solve. Then, give your team some uninterrupted thinking time and post-it notes, break them into groups, and wait to see what happens.

Brainstorming sessions usually end with an ideas-sharing round. You’ll probably notice consistent themes emerging between post-its. Group similar notes until you have a backlog of potential solutions. Highlight the ones that are viable with your business model and will have the biggest impact on key metrics.

These sessions can happen live or asynchronously depending on where you host the session. “I’ll create a FigJam for the team to use and freely discuss what we want to learn, and the type of questions we think will help us get clarity on our learning goals,” explains Phoebe.

“Then, I sort and group the stickies into two categories: research questions and user interview questions, which helps the team get a better understanding of the types of questions that fall under each.” Phoebe wraps it up when she believes the team is confident enough to continue the work on their own.

Brainstorming can happen at all times. It’s usually the go-to method during ideation and prioritization, but it touches all parts of the lifecycle. Use brainstorming sessions whenever you need to come up with product ideas or solutions, or simply want to listen to different opinions on a topic.

A complete list of when to host these meetings would be endless. Brainstorming might be useful if you want to::

Prioritizing what to work on first is a major part of product management. There are multiple frameworks to properly set priorities. These include:

Depending on why you’re conducting product discovery, you might not need such complex prioritization frameworks. You can also move forward with development using a simple technique to rank potential solutions in terms of feasibility and viability, such as:

Then compare the average scores to get a prioritized list

Working on product development means prioritizing all the time. While these techniques are mostly used during ideation and prioritization, you should learn how to categorize your work in order of urgency and importance for every stage of product discovery. For example, it’s useful to know how to prioritize questions to ask users during interviews, in case you run out of time.

Every iteration starts with a prototype, rather than a perfectly designed and developed product. Remember that the goal of product discovery is to validate a hypothesis before you start the development process. So the quicker and more straightforward it is to build your prototype, the better.

A paper prototype or low-fidelity sketch will work perfectly for new features or initial product designs. You need your prototype to be easy to tweak, iterate, or scrap if needed, based on customer feedback.

With a prototype, you should be able to make all required edits before you spend money on actually developing the solution. Use prototype testing to identify how your users interact with early versions of your product and review data to make improvements.

Use this technique during the prototype and test stage. You can also use it anytime you need to understand how your users will interact with your tool—whether that’s testing navigation or assessing usability—before spending too much money and time on development.

This method is used to evaluate how easy your users find it to use your product or website. During a usability test, present your users with test scenarios and tasks they need to complete on your platform. Gather insights based on behavior and comments to make usability improvements.

The earlier you start usability testing, the better. Even if you don’t have the time or resources to arrange many usability tests for product discovery, there are still rapid ways to get user feedback on your early concepts and ideas:

Conduct these types of tests during the prototype and test stage, i.e. whenever you launch a new product or feature, or implement design changes. It’s also good practice to conduct usability testing regularly as part of continuous product discovery.

Each product discovery method can help you remain anchored to user-centricity throughout various stages of the product lifecycle. As you talk to your users, remember to use methods that are aligned with your research objectives and business goals.

The best products are, unsurprisingly, the ones that solve user problems—so make the most of your customer interviews, analytics, and competitors' analysis to identify pain points. Determine the root cause of issues with the five ‘whys’ techniques, brainstorm and prioritize to outline a hypothesis, then prototype and run usability tests to determine whether or not your product is easy to use.

Build these steps and techniques into your continuous discovery process to ensure every product decision is informed by real user input.

Now, you need a proper tech stack to start testing your platform. Read our next chapter to review potential product discovery tools to try.