Product discovery checklist: Aligning products with users

Creating features isn’t why product teams exist. And yet, oftentimes people assume that it is.

If the CEO wants something, then that becomes the priority. If sales promise something, then the team has to deliver it. Or maybe an influential stakeholder has an insight, and then that becomes the direction.

But what about what customers truly need?

That’s the part that’s often forgotten. Teams get too busy juggling multiple things that distract them from creating what truly matters.

Product discovery helps you avoid costly mistakes by centering the customer in your development process. This way you can understand your customers and build products around their wants and needs.

Keep reading for a checklist that you can use within your product team to ensure your products align with your users.

Checklist for product discovery

For your product team to thrive, you need the following ten elements:

1. Product trio

The term product trio became popular after Teresa Torres continuously mentioned it. You might also have heard it referred to as Three Amigos. Don’t worry—they mean the same thing.

A product trio explores the future to uncover value drivers. It helps you de-risk product ideas before implementing them and often consists of three different disciplines to ensure diverse perspectives.

A classic product trio will have:

• A product manager to ensure the viability of the product
• A product designer to explore desirability and usability
• And, a tech person to understand the feasibility

The disciplines may vary according to your product and scenario. Ensure you have what’s needed to explore different ideas and even experiment with high-level solutions.

Now, you may wonder about the number three. It’s a good idea for a few reasons:

1. The team is small enough to progress fast
2. It enables simple decision making
3. Two can disagree and one can referee

2. Alignment

Have you heard the term stakeholder management? Let me be blunt, it sucks.

People hate being managed.

You’ll struggle to manage stakeholders who want more than you can ever deliver. Instead, aim for:

• Alignment on what to achieve
• Alignment on what’s unimportant
• Alignment on what not to do
• Alignment on what success looks like
• Alignment on how they can support you

Product trios need to ensure alignment with business stakeholders. Without that, stakeholders will continuously knock on your door:

3. Routine

Product discovery requires continuous iterations. You cannot thrive without discipline. Try to develop a flow you can lean on. You should have a sense of:

• Which ideas are bad
• How your product experiments are going
• The scale of the experiment or whether to drop the idea
• An understanding with stakeholders
• The success of the solutions you’re exploring

The following image shows how I like structuring product discovery and delivery:

4. Share progress

Nothing talks louder than results.

Management can be adverse to discovery because they often associate it with open-ended research that fails to deliver value. If you want to gain support, you need to share the discoveries you make.

Whenever someone asks me, “Why should we do discovery?” My answer is simple:

Discovery done right helps you avoid creating features nobody cares about.

Product discovery cannot guarantee value creation, but it does increase the chances of it. It also helps to cut bad investments short, which is often ignored by many companies.

As part of the product trio, you’ll make many decisions. You don’t need to share everything with everyone, which would be overwhelming, but you’d foster alignment and support by sharing:

• The blindspots you uncover
• Value drivers you’re considering and how the business can benefit
• Evidence of why certain ideas couldn’t survive contact with reality
• The value created by solutions you’re experimenting with
• Confidence you have in reaching desired business outcomes

5. Share the insights

Aligned with the previous item, you want to ensure stakeholders become aware of insights you collected from product experiments. This will help you gain trust and increase credibility.

Many companies do not encourage product experiments because they are unaware of the benefits they bring to the team. Take that as an opportunity to show them.

Here are a few examples:

• Share your learnings from customer interviews
• Go through past failures
• Communicate value drivers
• Ensure stakeholders know about potential pivots

When you do these things, you bring stakeholders closer to you. If you get them excited, product discovery will gradually gain support, so you won’t need to beg for time to run product experiments before implementing solutions.

6. Ideate

How do you define solutions for problems you choose to solve? I generally see the following options:

• Someone outside the team decides what to do
• The PM (or equivalent) defines and the team implements
• Collaboratively defined

The first two options often lead to suboptimal solutions, as well as features nobody needs. However the last one works well. Try this by:

1. Invite a diverse group
   1. Ensure you have people from the business
   2. Get the whole product team onboard
   3. Don’t be shy to invite customers when possible
2. Bring everyone to the same page
   1. If you’re part of the product trio, you have the context that others lack
   2. Invite the ideation participants for a 30-minute meeting and share the context
   3. Ensure everyone understands the problem space
3. Ideate
   1. Choose an ideation method (e.g., crazy eights, brainstorming, etc.)
   2. You can join context and ideation, but I don’t recommend
   3. I prefer having context setting in one day and ideation the next day
4. Drop unrelated ideas
   1. During any ideation, it’s normal to come up with ideas that are unrelated to your objective. Drop them
   2. After that, you can prioritize what to work on next

From ideation, you should have potential solutions to benefit from the value driver you selected.

7. Define 3 solutions to explore

One thing that still shocks me is the unwillingness to explore multiple solutions for the same problem. Companies still “love” going all in on solutions instead of gradually exploring their potential.

A lot of people dislike ideation sessions because the results can be predictable. There can be a tendency to commit to the most conservative solution. That said, you can break out of this habit by exploring three solutions and measuring the results they create:

• Take one or two conservative solutions
• Ensure you agree on more innovative solutions

8. Define assumptions

Assumptions are everywhere. It’s easy to ignore them because they hide in your subconscious. Common assumptions about products include:

• People want it
• People will pay for it
• We can deliver a valuable solution
• Users will understand how to use it

Assumptions aren’t necessarily bad, but it’s a bad idea to implement solutions without testing critical assumptions.

The first step is to identify your assumptions. You can do that two ways:

1. User journey — Create the user journey you imagine, and for each step, define what you assume to happen
2. A poor product launch — Imagine you brought your solution to life, but it went dramatically wrong. What happened? These are your assumptions

Once you identify your assumptions, write them in a simple, testable way that validates progress. This might seem simple, but it can be tricky.

Let’s say you used my second suggestion of identifying assumptions. You realize your idea could go wrong because users won’t understand your value proposition and refuse to pay. Testing an assumption formulated this way is tricky. It’s better to test the behavior you want to see. Here are some examples:

• Customers find our value proposition attractive enough to sign up
• We can deliver the AI-based learning platform
• We can drive enough traffic to our landing page
• Customers will upgrade to premium after experimenting with the trial version

9. Run experiments

You should only test assumptions that lack substantial evidence and are business critical—the others you could ignore.

Now, here comes the trick… remain curious. It’s not about proving yourself right; it’s about learning and uncovering hidden opportunities.

Another critical aspect is the testing speed. The faster you test it, the better.

Your first experiment should run in hours and give you direction. Then, you can run some experiments that take a few days. Once you’ve shaped enough, you’re ready to implement a solution.

When I created my first cohort last year, I had an assumption people would be interested in attending a live course with me. Here’s my experiment sequence:

1. Survey — I launched an interest survey on LinkedIn to evaluate how interested people would be in my courses. I got a few hundred replies in a day and identified a pattern. I confirmed that I had interest, but had to learn more in-depth about the challenges people wanted to address
2. Interview — I interviewed six people who replied to my survey to learn more about their motivations, challenges, and objectives. After the fourth interview, a pattern was clear, and I started developing a course idea in my head
3. Landing page — I crafted a quick landing page on my website to check who was serious about attending the course. I got ten paid customers in two weeks, which justified crafting the course

10. Rinse and repeat

Product discovery is more of an art than a science. Strive to learn from reality and adapt your practices. Don’t waste time crafting the first processes because that doesn’t exist. Reflect on what didn’t work and improve it.

Key takeaways

Applying product discovery is a journey that takes time. Use the checklist to uncover opportunities to improve it. As you get into discovery, remember the importance of curiosity and courage.

Use every opportunity you have as a chance to learn. Collaboration beats processes. Always treat discovery as a collaborative game, not a coordinative one.

Featured image source: IconScout