Building successful digital products with UX & Product Discovery

Let's talk about how using UX and product discovery techniques helps you build better digital products. Now, if you are building products for some time, like you're a founder or maybe a product manager, then you already know that there are 2 inconvenient truths when it comes to product, and you most probably already experienced this. Now, the first one is that almost half of those big ideas that end up on the roadmap might not bring any value for the customer or the business. The second one is that even those that prove to have potential to bring value for the customer and the business means that they are viable, valuable, feasible, and usable, they need multiple iterations to get it right. And this is even more important in these times when companies are fighting to reduce costs and be as profitable as possible. So sorting out those ideas that have the potential to bring in value versus those that don't have a potential to bring in value and also iterate as fast as possible on those that prove to be on the right track, it's even more important. Let's explore why half of those ideas or projects on your roadmap might not deliver what you expect, but also focus on those things, on those aspects that you can tweak in order to get the most value out of the other ones that actually prove to be valuable for your business and your customers. First of all, value isn't there. That means that the customers are not excited about the idea. It's not something they are looking for or something they would use. Then maybe usability isn't there. So the customer would use it, would like to try it out, but they can't figure out how to actually do this. It's just too complicated for them. There is the feasibility part, meaning that it's harder to build. And deliver than first expected. And this comes with higher costs, more time, more resources invested, and it might not make sense in business perspective at this time. And the last one is the business viability part, meaning that there is something like legal, financial, or any kind of business constraint that might block the launch of this product or feature. So then there is this question of how you can actually deal with all these risks upfront, how you can sort through all these ideas. Then obviously the question is how you can actually deal with these risks upfront, how you can sort through these ideas. We can look at Marty Cagan's book Inspired where he mentions that if we can prototype and test ideas with users, customers, engineers, and business stakeholders in hours and days rather than in weeks and months, It changes the dynamics and most important, the result. And this is something that we have— and this is something that we do with our clients, helping them to prototype and test ideas in weeks or days instead of doing it and build product in months. And to summarize it, this is what product discovery is kind of all about. So let's see what product discovery is. Product discovery is the continuous process of closely understanding what your customers' problems and needs are, then validating your solution ideas before starting development. So it helps you decide what to build, and also it helps you learn fast. All this in order to help you tackle those risks upfront instead of figuring out these things once you developed and launched the product. If you ask yourself, why is this important, then let's see together. First of all, It helps you validate ideas the fastest and cheapest way possible. That means that you can try out multiple ideas, and for those that are promising, you can try out multiple versions of the same idea. It helps you reduce risks and uncertainty around investing time and money in those initiatives that won't work out. Also, it helps you get a deep understanding of the problems, the opportunities, and the customer. So it's a good idea to think about product discovery when you want to launch a new product, when you want to upgrade an existing product, or there are any kind of major business changes like new business opportunities, mergers, acquisitions, things like this, or you kind of shift or pivot the whole business strategy. It's also important to mention that it should be a continuous process in order to help you get the most out of it. That means acquiring new information from your customers, covering new opportunities, new challenges that they tackle, and improving the product as the whole process goes. Now, when we are talking about the phases of product discovery, we have 4: uncover the underlying challenges, interpret the findings and reframe the problem, identify creative solutions, and collect feedback and validate your solutions. The Double Diamond, it's a great way to illustrate the product discovery process. As you can see, we have 2 big parts. The first part, it's about the problem space, and the second one, it's about the solution space. In the problem space, the focus is around understanding and defining the problem, and in the solution space, we focus on ideas, prototypes, and tests. This is a great overview of why the product discovery is a continuous process. We have the strategic vision from where we extract ideas Those ideas end up in an idea backlog. The discovery team will pick them up, will send them towards the users or customers, will collect feedback and maybe new ideas. And based on those, they will decide if it goes into the trash or it goes towards the delivery team. If it goes into the delivery team's backlog, then the delivery team will pick it up. They will make the final adjustments and then ship it towards the users. Now, once it's in the user's hands, they might come up with new requests, new ideas, and new challenges. Which goes back into the idea backlog of the discovery team. Closing this section with Marty Cagan's quote, I argue that qualitative testing of your product ideas with real users and customers is probably the single most important discovery activity for you and your product team. So exactly as we discussed, putting things in the hands of your customers, testing them upfront as fast as possible, and gathering those insights, gathering the feedback from them It's the most important discovery activity that you and your team can do. I want to walk you through one of the projects we worked on a few years ago for an edtech company. Now, for the context, this is COVID era when everything moved online, schools moved online. So it was really, really important to figure out a way that these products can work and help most of the customers or all of the customers if possible. At that stage, this company served 650 schools and around 100,000 users here in Romania. The goal of our collaboration was, first of all, to streamline the onboarding process, but in essence, to redesign the whole product. What you see on the left was the product at that stage, and what you see on the right is what we ended up having after this whole process. The process we used for this redesign was split in 3 big parts. Research and strategy, then we had a week of design sprint, and the third part was about design. So during the research and strategy week, we focused on gathering all the information that we needed in order to have a proper understanding of the context. That means that first of all, we had a discussion with the founders to map out all the critical building blocks of the business and the product. We checked out competitors, We discussed positioning, we defined the user persona. We also mapped the customer journey map and identified together the area that was the biggest pain point in the customer journey for teachers at this time, because that was our focus for now. Having all this information in one place gave us a good understanding of the business, of the product, of the pain points, and also of the customers. So it was easier to understand their biggest struggle when it came to the product. The next stage was about creating and testing solutions. Now with the whole team in the workshop, we first wanted to make sure that everybody speaks the same language and everybody understands exactly what we are doing, what we want to do, and why we want to do that. So we focused on alignment. Then we revisited together the customer journey map and we moved into the research phase, which means that we wanted to see how others are solving similar challenges. For this, we looked both for the competitors, but for also other products from various industries. After the research, everybody had time to— after the research, everybody had time to come up with their way of solving this challenge for the schools and improve their experience altogether. Once we had the concepts in one place, it was easy to define the prototype and then put the whole thing together and test this with customers, settings that they— We then presented the prototype to teachers and collected the feedback. Most of it was positive, but there were a couple of aspects that we could improve. Some of them were regarding the menu bar and some other ones regarding some functionalities that the company wanted to create. Now, once we had all this with the prototype and the feedback collected, it was easy to figure out the next step, and this is where we moved in the product design phase. So in the product design phase, we focused on iterating on the product based on the feedback collected from the teachers. And this is also the time where we defined the design system and also created all of the assets needed for development. As a summary, once we went through this 3 or 4 weeks of work, the team had a clear understanding of the product's context and its challenges with assets they can revisit after that. We defined and tweaked the target customer. We tested and validated the new design direction and the whole onboarding flow for teachers. Then we discovered new insights from the teachers while we were testing the prototype, and then we prepared all the assets for development. That means the design system and all the design assets and files. If improving your product is one of your top priorities, then send me a message. Happy to help.