Iterative Discovery
It’s a harsh reality to build a product only to find out later that what you’ve built is not what your customers are looking for. This is a mistake I’ve seen product people make over and over again. There’s a better way to build, one that puts the customer at the heart of what you build instead of the focus being on the competition, one that prioritizes what your customers truly need instead of what you think they need. I am talking about iterative product discovery, the process of discovering the right product to build.
If you have an existing product and the ideas for new features just can’t stop coming, or you have a great idea, one that will create value for your business and customers, before you rush on and start building consider applying the following iterative discovery measures to ensure that you work on the right things.
Define the business value you want to achieve
Any product you build should be able to deliver some form of business value. More importantly, to enable that value to be delivered the product should be supported by a strong underlying business model.
Define your customer needs, problems, and desires.
Customers find value in solutions that either meet their needs, and desires or solve their pain points. However, depending on the severity, they are more likely to prefer solutions that solve their biggest pain points. It’s all a matter of prioritising to solve the biggest pain points to the least pain points
Creating detailed user personas based on research is one of the best ways to help you empathize with your users and customers. Empathy helps us create features tailored to our
customer's needs and behaviours.
Ideate on a solution
This is a creative process that helps us ideate and conceptualise solutions to the different problems your customers face. All ideas are welcome at this stage, the idea is to keep an open mind and make room for different solutions to surface.
Select your ideas based on what is feasible technically, financially or operationally.
Prototype and test
Create prototypes that allow you to validate and test your assumptions with minimal resources quickly. It is important to have a criterion for what success looks like for a prototype. Once a prototype has successfully passed testing it can make it into development the out to the market.
Conclusion
Iterative discovery is about continually asking yourself the following questions at any point in your product cycle,
- Is the product you are building delivering real, measurable business value?
- Is your product meeting a need?
- Are you continually ideating and improving upon your solution?
