Lessons on Product Culture and Product Discovery
Design methodologies evolve quickly, and people talk a lot these days about product culture, discovery, product design, and product management. This article will help you understand these topics.
I currently work for a SaaS company (Software as a Service) in the lawtech or legaltech segment. When I joined in 2017, we were still talking mostly about UX and UI. Over the years, we came across the book Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love, and that is when we started to dive into this idea of "product." I studied the book and began following the channels that covered the subject, until we understood that qualitative and quantitative research could be led by an important role: Product Management, which should lead the Discovery process.
This book now has a Portuguese edition, titled Inspirado: Como Criar Produtos De Tecnologia Que Os Clientes Amam.
Put simply, Discovery is a strategic stage where the Product Manager investigates inside and outside the company to build a list of items with a high chance of being adopted, that bring profit and contribute to the growth of the business.
With the product manager, we get a more strategic view of what we should build in each development period, and through Discovery we start getting closer to customers.
As a Product Designer, my role is to support and facilitate qualitative and quantitative research techniques, understand customers' pain points and the strategies we will use to solve their problems, considering business, legal, technological, cultural, behavioral, and timeline constraints.
Once a problem is chosen to be solved, the process I have been working with generally has these stages:
Immersion
Ideation
Prototyping
Testing
Adjustments
Pitch writing
Development
Supporting the team
Learnings from the released feature
This is really similar to other approaches, but what I learned is that product culture brings to the product manager's role a consolidation of project management, user research, Design Thinking, Service Design, and other activities. In other words, a more holistic view of the product.
What changes day to day is that, as a designer, I can work alongside the Product Manager on Discovery, understanding customers' pain points, but focusing on qualitative and quantitative research techniques, facilitating interactions with stakeholders, and on usability and design. This helps a lot, because most of the time, what we work on really makes sense in terms of desirability (customers want to use it), sustainability (it makes financial sense), and feasibility (it can be built within existing constraints). I say this because it is very common for features without product-market fit to be built nonstop at tech companies, without bringing value to people.
To understand what some Product Management experts say, let's look at a few quotes.
"Product Management is the area responsible for connecting the company's strategy with customers' problems and needs through software. It must help the company reach its strategic goals while solving customers' problems and needs."
Joaquim Torres
"The Discovery track is about quickly generating validated items for the Product Backlog, and the Delivery track is about developing software in a way that gets it into users' hands as quickly as possible."
Marty Cagan
Product delivery is the process of building in a Lean way what was found in Discovery. According to Cagan, you must also always assess the risks of Value, Usability, Technical Feasibility, and Business, and we need to find out whether:
Are we working on a real problem?
Is there demand?
Do we know the problem well enough?
Do users see enough value to use or buy it?
Another fundamental concept of product culture is to pursue Outcomes (results) rather than Outputs (deliverables).
"At the end of the day, your job is to minimize output and maximize outcome and impact."
Jeff Patton
User Story Mapping
As for the product area, it can be understood as responsible for every aspect of a product, from strategic goals to the user experience, throughout the product's life, from conception to the end.
An important part of this process is measuring results through qualitative and quantitative metrics. In other words, after a product is delivered, you need to track its performance and consumers' impressions.
Of course, all of this is usually challenging. I think these methodologies need to be adapted and matured within each company's process, and that the first step to improving this process is to study it and build a little at a time within the product team. The intention can come from managers or from the team, and every context has its own challenges.
Another important point is that the product approach should run on a track of continuous discovery and continuous delivery. In other words, while the Product Manager works on discovery for what has already been delivered and what should go into development in the next period, there should be an autonomous product team (developers, designers, quality analysts) iterating and learning from partial deliveries of the product, running usability tests in production, for example, on the live system available to customers. This is also called Dual Track Agile.
Image source: https://aktiasolutions.com/product-discovery/
The goal of Discovery is to learn quickly, not to validate hypotheses. Hypotheses should be validated with the product in customers' hands, in a real scenario. After a feature launches, Discovery continues through research, and only then can the hypotheses be validated.
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