What is product discovery? A guide for Agile teams

Summary:

In this guide, you will learn:

• What product discovery is and why it’s critical for successful product development

• Key concepts and activities involved in product discovery

• The phases and objectives of the discovery process

• How to apply proven product discovery frameworks

• Questions to ask during product discovery

• Best practices for running effective, user-focused product discovery sessions

Who is this article for: Product managers

Too many products fail because teams jump straight into building without fully understanding the problem they’re trying to solve - or who they’re solving it for. Misaligned priorities, vague requirements, and user needs assumptions all lead to wasted time, missed opportunities, and costly reworks.

Product discovery is the backbone of successful product development. It’s the process that helps teams understand what to build, for whom, and why. Done right, discovery reduces risk, aligns your team, and sets you up for smoother launches and better outcomes. 

This guide will walk you through everything you need to know to master this essential phase. Let's go!

What is product discovery?

Product discovery is about identifying and validating the right problems to solve before you start building a product or new feature. It’s a continuous process that involves understanding user needs, market demands, and potential solutions. 

The product discovery process is critical in the product lifecycle because it sets the foundation for everything that follows.

Key concepts of product discovery

Before building the right product, you need to understand the problem you’re solving and for whom. This is where core product discovery techniques come in, guiding you to make smarter, confident decisions from the start.

• User research: Understanding the behaviors, needs, and motivations of your users through various research methods.

• Market analysis: Evaluating the market landscape to identify opportunities and threats.

• Ideation: Generating a wide range of ideas and potential solutions.

• Prototyping: Creating simple versions of your product to test ideas quickly.

• Validation: Testing assumptions and hypotheses to ensure they are correct.

Product discovery helps in reducing risks by validating ideas early. It ensures the team is building something that users actually need and are willing to pay for. This phase is crucial for aligning the team’s vision with user expectations and market realities.

What are the benefits of product discovery?

Product discovery isn’t just a critical step in the development process - it can empower teams to make smarter decisions, reduce risk, and create products that resonate.

• Reduces development waste

• Improves product-market fit

• Strengthens cross-functional alignment

• Grounds decisions in real user insights

• Enables faster iteration and learning

• Mitigates risk and uncertainty

• Increases stakeholder confidence

• Improves user experience

How does product discovery work?

The product discovery phase is where the magic happens in the product lifecycle. During this phase, teams engage in activities like user research, market analysis, and ideation. 

The main objective is to gather insights that will inform the product development process. This phase is all about exploration and validation, ensuring the team is on the right track before moving forward.

Key activities and objectives

To run an effective product discovery process, you must combine the right activities with clear objectives. This will help you gather insights, explore ideas, and validate solutions before moving into development. 

• User interviews: Conducting interviews to gather qualitative data about user needs and pain points.

• Surveys: Distributing surveys to collect quantitative data from a larger audience.

• Competitive analysis: Studying competitors to understand their strengths and weaknesses.

• Brainstorming sessions: Facilitating sessions to generate a wide range of ideas.

• Prototyping and testing: Creating low-fidelity prototypes to test ideas quickly and gather feedback.

Product discovery example

Imagine you’re developing a new project management tool. During the product discovery process, you might complete the following tasks:

• Conduct interviews with project managers to understand their biggest challenges, such as missed deadlines, unclear task ownership, or difficulties collaborating across distributed teams. These conversations highlight the pain points your tool needs to solve.

• Analyze existing tools to identify gaps in the market to see what’s already working well in the market. You might notice that while many tools offer scheduling, few support seamless cross-team collaboration.

• Send out surveys to a broader audience to confirm how widespread these issues are and prioritise which problems matter most to solve first.

• Host brainstorming sessions with your product team to explore solutions. Ideas could include shared dashboards, automatic progress updates, or integrations with tools teams already love.

• Prototype the most promising features and test them with users early. For example, you could mock up a drag-and-drop timeline or real-time task assignment flow and see how people interact with it.

Gathering all of this information will guide your ideation and prototyping efforts, ensuring your final product addresses real user needs.

Product discovery framework

A solid product discovery framework can make all the difference. Popular frameworks like Lean Startup and Design Thinking provide structured approaches to guide the discovery process. 

Lean Startup emphasizes rapid experimentation and learning, while Design Thinking focuses on empathy and user-centric design. Both frameworks help teams navigate the complexities of product discovery with confidence.

Lean Startup

• Build-Measure-Learn: This cycle encourages teams to build a minimum viable product (MVP), measure its performance, and learn from the results.

• Validated learning: Focuses on learning what users really want through experiments and feedback.

Lean Startup example

If you’re using the Lean Startup framework to develop a new budgeting app, you would start by identifying a key assumption. For example, it could be that young professionals want an easier way to track daily expenses and savings goals. 

Instead of building a full-featured product, you’d start by creating a minimum viable product (MVP). This could be a simple mobile prototype that lets users manually input expenses and view a basic spending summary.

From here, you could release the MVP to a small group of target users and measure how they interact with it. Based on the insights you discover, you’ll enter the learn phase, discovering perhaps that users want automated bank syncing more than manual entry.

With validated learning, you would revise your product direction, update your MVP, and run another cycle of testing. This will help you avoid over-investing in features users don’t need, ensuring the final product is shaped by real behaviors and not assumptions.

By staying lean and iterative, through a process of continuous product discovery, your team can move fast, minimize risk, and build something that solves meaningful problems.

Design Thinking

• Empathize: Understanding the user’s needs and problems.

• Define: Clearly articulating the problem you’re trying to solve.

• Ideate: Generating a wide range of ideas.

• Prototype: Creating simple versions of the product to test ideas.

• Test: Gathering feedback and iterating on the product.

Design Thinking example

If you’re using the Design Thinking framework to develop a new fitness app, you would start by empathizing with users through interviews and observations to understand their needs and pain points. This involves defining the core problem, such as "Busy professionals need a simple and flexible way to integrate effective workouts into their daily routines." 

With this clear problem statement, you move on to ideate potential solutions, brainstorming a variety of ideas like quick workout routines or personalized fitness plans. You then create low-fidelity prototypes, such as wireframes or clickable mockups, to visualize these ideas.

Next, you test these prototypes with real users to gather feedback and identify areas for improvement. This iterative process of empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, and testing ensures that the final product is both user-friendly and effective. 

By continuously refining your design based on user insights, you create a fitness app that truly resonates with your audience, addressing their needs and enhancing their fitness journey.

Essential product discovery questions

Asking the right product discovery questions is key to uncovering valuable insights. Here are some critical questions to consider:

• Who are our target users?: Identifying the primary audience for your product.

• What problems are they facing?: Understanding the pain points and challenges of your users.

• How are they currently solving these problems?: Analyzing existing solutions and their limitations.

• What value can our product provide?: Determining the unique value proposition of your product.

• What are the key features needed to solve these problems?: Identifying the must-have features for your product.

These questions help teams understand user needs and market fit, ensuring the product is both desirable and viable. They guide the product discovery process by focusing on the most critical aspects of product development.

Let’s take a new e-commerce platform as an example. You might ask users about their current shopping experiences, what frustrates them, and what features they wish existed. This information will help you design a platform that addresses their needs and stands out in the market.

How to do product discovery

To conduct successful product discovery, there are some best practice steps you should consider following:

• Involve cross-functional teams: Engage team members from different departments to gain diverse perspectives.

• Validate assumptions early and often: Test your assumptions with real users to avoid costly mistakes later.

• Stay user-focused: Prioritize user needs and feedback throughout the process.

• Use data to inform decisions: Rely on data and insights rather than intuition alone.

• Document what you learn: Capture insights, validated hypotheses, and decision history so teams can build upon the knowledge.

• Prioritize problems before solutions: Ensure the team understands the problems before jumping to ideation and features.

• Run continuous product discovery: Keep learning, even after launch, to refine and evolve the product as user needs change.

• Align on success metrics early: Define how you’ll measure the solution is working to ensure you remain focused on the outcomes.

Common product discovery pitfalls

Even with the best intentions, product discovery can go wrong. To get the most value from your product discovery process, understanding the common pitfalls to avoid is key. 

• Skipping user research: Neglecting user research can lead to products that don’t meet user needs.

• Rushing through the discovery phase: Taking shortcuts can result in incomplete or inaccurate insights.

• Ignoring feedback: Failing to act on user feedback can lead to missed opportunities for improvement.

When developing a new feature for your software, involve team members from design, development, marketing, and customer support. This ensures all perspectives are considered, leading to a more well-rounded and user-centric product.

“We could work day and night through different time zones. We all looked at the same Miro boards. We had one version of the truth. It was a much more democratic creative process without slowdowns.” - Koen Burghouts, VP Innovation & Emerging Brands 

Read more about how PepsiCo brings new products to market faster with Miro.

Product discovery tools

Leveraging the right product discovery tools can streamline the process. Tools like Miro’s innovation workspace, with its AI-powered visual canvas, facilitate real-time and asynchronous collaboration.

Using Miro, your team can create a shared visual workspace to map out user journeys, brainstorm ideas, and collaborate in real-time or asynchronously. This enhances communication and ensures everyone is on the same page throughout the discovery process. 

Use one of our many templates to start your product discovery session.

Product Discovery kick-off workshop

The Product Discovery workshop template is deliberately designed to be collaborative - so include your stakeholders and do the workshop together. This template was created by Ant Murphy.

Product Discovery ideation session

As part of Product Discovery, cross-functional product teams should be given the autonomy and freedom to explore the solution space on their own. Start now with the Product Discovery ideation session template, created by Tim Herbig.

Product target audience template

Identify and understand your target audience using the Define Your Product's Target Audience template. Align product development with customer needs.

Get started with product discovery today

Explore +100 templates to help your product development process get to the next stage. Ready to elevate your product discovery process? Try Miro’s Product Development tools today and see how our collaboration features can transform your team’s approach to product development.

Product discovery FAQs

When should product discovery start? 

Product discovery should start before any development begins, but it’s not a one-time event. Continuous product discovery is vital for ensuring your products stay relevant to your audience and evolve with their needs.

What is the difference between product discovery and product delivery?

Product discovery is all about identifying the right problems to solve and validating ideas before building. Product delivery is the process of executing those ideas - developing, launching, and maintaining the solution.

Who should be involved in product discovery?

It’s important to include cross-functional teams in the product discovery process. Try to include product managers, designers, engineers, researchers, and stakeholders from sales, marketing, and support to bring in diverse insights.

How long should product discovery last?

Product discovery has no fixed timeline. It can last for a few days to several weeks, depending on the problem you’re solving and the solution you hope to build. Remember, it’s a process you’ll need to keep running as consumer needs change.

Can product discovery be done remotely?

Yes, product discovery can be completed remotely with tools like Miro. Our product discovery software can help your remote teams ideate, prototype, and validate ideas in real time or asynchronously across time zones.