What is product discovery?

[David]

All I can find on this is marketing language. Are there any resources available to explain what this is and how it works?

[Tanguy Crusson]

Hi @David , it's basically a process used by product teams to assess opportunities and validate them with learnings - continuously, testing early and often (vs committing to ideas without data, shipping the wrong thing, and losing a whole bunch of time and money in the process). Think about it as bringing agile to product management, instead of the waterfall-style agile you can come across where product managers and designers design a solution in isolation, then send it to a dev team to implement (and the dev team uses SCRUM or Kanban to do so), only to realize that the solution isn't seen as valuable or usable by end users - something which could have been tested earlier with interviews and a prototype. 

We haven't yet published our "ways of working" to explain how we recommend teams do product discovery (it's part of what we're teasing out in the beta too!), but in the meantime I recommend the following blogs from Marty Cagan, svpg.com, to get an intro to product discovery:

https://svpg.com/discovery-vs-delivery/

https://svpg.com/four-big-risks/

https://svpg.com/continuous-discovery/

https://svpg.com/managing-commitments-in-an-agile-team/