The Risks of Not Doing Product Discovery

What happens when a customer doesn’t really need you? Building products that fail is less likely to happen if you do Product Discovery. Executing ideas without first identifying their values — or jumping to a solution before you understand the problem — will end up in launching a product that doesn’t solve a problem.

One of the benefits Product Discovery gives you is a chance to understand the customer and their pain points in order to create an effective solution. As aforementioned, if you build something that misses the market, you’ll waste time, money and potential customers.

Without a doubt, being empathetic and on the same wavelength as your customers will help you avoid frustration. Thus, it is key that you know exactly who you are targeting as your customer. Understanding the context and their need for the product will serve to support the discovery process in order to improve your company’s results and reach the best business outcomes. Ultimately, making wise decisions that result in a better product and better outcome is what you want to accomplish.

They develop a product that solves an issue but isn’t validated during development

This leads to companies creating a product where the user doesn’t feel like said product solves their issues.

Let’s use a real-life example here. Imagine you want a house built, and you hire out a construction company. However, they never asked you for specifications throughout the building process. By the time the house is done, it’ll check all of your boxes, but would you live in it? The answer is probably no.

This is the reality of software. Unless you have a process and methodology defined throughout the development cycle, it’s hard to have a quality end product.

You need to start validating during the development cycle. Going back to the house example, if the construction company only builds the first floor and then gets feedback, they can more efficiently and effectively build the rest.

Also, this same issue often occurs within the banking sector. They see they have an issue, but they’re so worried about time to market that they create digital products without checking with clients to see if the product will actually solve their problems. They just validate at the end when the product is completed.

Again, you need to always be validating as you go throughout the development cycle.