Product Discovery: General Discussion

[Melissa Miller]

What is product discovery for you? How and where do you do it? We would love to understand how you balance (or struggle to balance) discovery and delivery!

[John Funk]

This is from one of my Product Managers:

"Discovery for me is diving into customer context and seeking to understand their true problems, with that I can find the items that can relieve those customer pain-points while meeting our business goals. Discovery encompasses testing/validating a variety of ideas with the customer, assessing the risks of each, and creating directional guardrails for the team to go deliver value on.

We do discovery in both delivery and discovery "modes", discovery doesn't stop just because the devs and designer have a "delivery label" they should be getting customer feedback tweaking and changing to deliver strong value. Often initial discovery happens upstream of the delivery "board" on a separate board that allows for quick and fast flexibility. Often we scrap jira completely in favor for a whiteboard with discovery stuff.

I focus entirely on discovery, I have a delivery manager and tech lead for delivery. Whether its initial discovery or jumping in to help the delivery folks discover or tweak a solution that isn't performing as expected in the wild. When discovery is happening through the entire process I move around to help gather insight, break-down problems, test ideas etc."

[Tanguy Crusson]

That's very interesting @John Funk , and quite aligned with how we're currently looking at it. What are the types of issues you add to the separate "discovery" board and what do you do with them there? 

[John Funk]

Hi Tanguy - We have created a couple of custom issue types for this - One called Discovery and one called Ideas. Mainly because we use a couple of different workflows within the same large team. 

Maybe I can actually write an article this week that shows our setup.  :-)

[Tanguy Crusson]

Nice! I would actually love to read it if you write it, especially the difference between the 2 issue types