Sunday Rewind: How to avoid product discovery pitfalls, by Navin Nair

This week’s Sunday Rewind is a 2020 ProductTank London talk from product consultant Navin Nair who shares some common product management mistakes and pitfalls of the product discovery process.

Poorly defined scope

Navin divides scope into six sections that identify the:

1. Target user
2. Current problem
3. Current workaround
4. Proposed approach
5. Success criteria
6. Business value

He offers this advice on scope:

• Just do it! Write a first draft, which doesn’t need to be perfect, and iterate from there
• Get feedback on your early versions of the scope instead of just the final one
• Document what you won’t be doing as this will help you to manage expectations of what is going to be delivered

Too quick to a solution

People often first come up with a solution, find people who agree with them on it, and build it. This results in a product that doesn’t solve a problem.

Navin’s advice is to:

• Conduct regular customer interviews
• If you’re not sure what questions to ask customers, reverse engineer them from open questions (e.g. What problem is preventing you from X?)
• Ask customers what they’re trying to achieve in the real world, rather than what they’re doing with your product

Understand commercial value

Navin says a good product should provide value to both customer and company.

His advice for delivering commercial value:

• Write up the business value and opportunity size
• Test your values on customers – ask questions and act as if you’re selling to see how many people are interested
• Get an estimate of development costs and timebox that development

Watch the original talk: How to avoid product discovery pitfalls, by Navin Nair