Product Discovery
To determine whether or not a product should be built, we need to do discovery. The process of discovery helps you to reduce uncertainty, to better understand if a product is really what your users need and want, and to gather enough evidence to ensure that your solution has market value.
🔎 Product Discovery Focus Week 💡
June 14-20, 2021
This week (June 14-20), join us for Product Discovery Focus Week. Each day, visit this page and scroll down to find NEW content and links to events. Delve into actionable insights, expert advice, and join the conversation with product pros from around the world!
📆 Schedule 📆
- Mon 14 June – 🎥 Video + Blog: Watch the San Francisco ProductTank talk, Using Discovery Methods to Create Products That People Actually Want by Jenny Shirey
- Tues 15 June – 📖 FREE Book Excerpt: Settle in to a free chapter from Product Research Rules, courtesy of the authors, C. Todd Lombardo and Aras Bilgen
- Wed 16 June – 🎧 Podcast: In this episode of The Product Experience podcast, Digital Director and Design Lead, Simon Wilson, joins Lily and Randy to discuss his background in service design and how he uses it in his approach to discovery
- Wed 16 June – 🎤 LIVE Prioritised Panel Discussion: Research and Discovery: Join an exclusive panel featuring Steve Portigal, Cindy Alvarez, Michelle Lotia, Julian Thompson, and Eli Montgomery. For Discovery Focus Week only, this exclusive member panel is open to all 🎉. Register to attend now.
- Thur 17 June – 📝 Blog: There are many product discovery pitfalls to navigate so, to lend a helping hand, we’re sharing the solutions to 6 in Common product discovery fails and how to avoid them
- Fri 18 June – 🎥 Video + Blog [Prioritised & MTP Leader members only]: Mind the Product members can watch Discovery – the secret sauce of great Agile by Anthony Marter – a three-step guide for getting product discovery right
- Sun 20 June – 📝 Blog: Read Product Discovery or Product Delivery: How do you Decide? We look back at Phillipp Krehl’s popular 2019 post
💡 Want to unlock more? 💡
Become a Mind the Product member to access all of the content during this Focus Week, plus all #mtpcon videos, our library of self-paced training content, and more!
Explore all membership levels
💬 Social Fun 💬
Join us on our social channels all week for polls, conversations, and to share your challenges and learnings with your product peers.
Follow us on Twitter to join the discovery conversation!
🔎 Product Discovery Training 
We cover Evaluating Opportunity in our Communication & Alignment training workshop and Hypothesis and Testing in our Foundations workshop. Join us for one of our interactive remote workshops, where you’ll get full access to our tried-and-tested curriculums, expert trainers, and community of product peers.
Learn more and book now
We’re currently developing a brand new training workshop on Discovery & Research and would love to hear your thoughts on what will help us build the best possible workshop for you. If you’re keen to tell us or want to be notified when tickets go on sale, you can do that here.
FEATURED CONTENT
LATEST POSTS
Here Be Dragons - Product and Discovery, by Randy Silver
In this MTP Engage Manchester talk, Randy Silver (a freelance product consultant) takes us on a journey of discovery, with dragons, giants and better decisions. He explains to us the true meaning of product and discovery, while showing us how to use discovery more effectively to help in our jobs as product people. His key […] Read more »
Iterating Your Voice Product, by Lisa Vigar
In this MTP Engage Manchester talk, Lisa Vigar takes us through the journey – from launch proposition in September 2018, to winning a prestigious Webby award – of the BBC Voice for Kids Alexa app. She outlines some of the lessons learned around the challenges of developing voice products and working with children, and highlights the […] Read more »
Qualitative Intelligence by Mitchell Gillespie
In this ProductTank Toronto talk, Mitchell Gillespie (Director of Product Management at Wave HQ) shares some thoughts on what he calls “qualitative intelligence”. As product managers are constantly striving to understand why their customers and stakeholders behave in certain ways, they are often in dire need of high-impact qualitative understanding. Doing this will isn’t just […] Read more »
User Research for Product Managers by Yue Wu
The product manager is the voice of the user. In this ProductTank San Francisco talk, Yue Wu – Head of Product for Home & Local Services at Yelp – gives some stories and tips for understanding users and how to be more convincing as a product manager. This talk also includes a Q&A session at […] Read more »
Engaging with Remote Customers in Discovery by Audrey Cheng
In this Mind the Product APAC talk Audrey Cheng, VP Product at Pushpay, discusses the challenges of remote discovery, and reveals how she and her team have developed a practice to ensure better customer engagements that yield more value. Watch the talk in full or read on for a detailed overview. Her key points include: Data […] Read more »
How Gousto Unlocks Value With Discovery Teams
At most high-growth startups, engineering time is scarce, and targets are high. If you work on the wrong opportunity for a few months, you run a significant chance of missing your results. So how do you get the maximum amount of value out of a resource-constrained tech team? Product manager Nicolas Hemidy and I put our […] Read more »
Remote Discovery - Teresa Torres on The Product Experience
We’ve heard it again and again – these are odd times; we’re not working remotely, we’re working during a crisis; this is not the new normal. You’re not working the same way, and your customers have different needs than they did a month ago. We turned to Teresa Torres – our first repeat guest! – […] Read more »
Where Physical Meets Digital by Lucy Gill
For companies that are used to creating and managing physical products, the shift to digital can be quite challenging. In this ProductTank London talk, Lucy Gill, Founder of Digills Consulting gives some insight into these challenges. She takes us through: Things that catch companies off guard Why established businesses struggle Examples of physical and digital products […] Read more »
Product Discovery or Product Delivery: How do you Decide?
What’s the fundamental difference between product discovery and delivery or execution? The degree of uncertainty. The degree of uncertainty should determine whether you need to run product discovery or whether you can begin to deliver a solution to your customer. Why is it Important to Know the Degree of Uncertainty Upfront? Let’s walk through three hypothetical […] Read more »
How we set up our Team for Continuous Product Discovery
The Dilemma With Product Discovery Usually, we use a discovery period intending to understand the users’ problem, define a solution, and then decide what to build in the so-called “delivery”. Many companies have their specific budgets for these week or month-long periods and a super-important meeting at the end of the discovery to present the […] Read more »