Check out a step-by-step guide on how to gather information in the Discovery process and build solutions that solve your user's pain!
information , discovering opportunities , and proposing potential solutions that are valuable and useful to users, while also being viable and feasible for the business. The goal is to learn quickly through experimentation and then validate or invalidate hypotheses in order to discover what is valuable to users given a given problem.
There is no set recipe for how to gather information in this belarus mobile phone number process. However, there are different ways, methodologies and research techniques that you can apply in your context .
At the company I work for, the Product team was challenged to review one of the products in the portfolio with the aim of improving its usability and increasing the average ticket through the launch of new features. The product caters to 2 types of users and its usability was making it difficult for both profiles to use it, impacting the perceived value of our product.
To achieve this, the Smarket product team followed three steps to carry out this Discovery:
Understanding the problem
Data collection
Data synthesis
Below, I will explain each of the steps in more detail and a little about our process.
Defining your problem
Albert Einstein said that “if he had one hour to solve a problem, he would spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about the solution”.
And you will understand the importance of understanding the problem based on the following situation, which happened in a transport company and is portrayed in Falconi's book “Management by Guidelines”:
During a meeting of a transport company, the following dialogue took place:
Manager: We have a problem with a lack of trucks
Director: Is your goal to have a lot of trucks?
Manager: No, the purpose of my job is to transport cargo.
Director: So what's your goal?
Manager: Transport 120,000 tons per month. That is the market demand.
Director: How much are you able to transport?
Manager: 100,000 tons per month.
Director: So what's your problem?
Manager: My problem is: inability to transport the cargo demand.
Director: Then go and solve your problem.
The manager gathered information to better understand the problem and discovered that the trucks were frequently stopped at the workshop and on the road. At the workshop, there were sometimes lines for service and parts were missing. They discovered that there was no scheduled preventive maintenance for the trucks, there was no procedure for assisting the trucks on the road, and the parts inventory had not been measured for a long time. With this, they defined three solutions:
Establish a maintenance schedule (to avoid queues);
Resize parts inventory (to avoid parts shortages);
Establish a rescue schedule (to avoid trucks being stopped on the road for a long time).
After implementing the solutions, the target of transporting 120,000 tons of cargo per month was achieved and it was possible to reduce the truck fleet.
This example shows that correctly defining a problem can completely change the decision-making process.
To begin Discovery, be clear about the problem you are trying to solve and its context.
A simple tool that can help you discover the problem is the application of the 5 whys . It consists of asking 5 times why a reported problem occurred. It will not always be necessary to ask the question 5 times; in some cases, we can find the root cause in the third why.
To start Discovery, in a Miro we answer the question: why are we discovering this product?
"why?" written above image with post-its
With the survey, it was possible to summarize the problem and the reason why we were doing product discovery.
Collecting data
With the problem outlined, we defined 5 data collection steps that served as a basis for devising the solution.
1. User Story Map
In this article , I explained the process used to map the user stories of our products in the “understanding the products” stage . With the map drawn, we analyzed the main points for improvement of the product.
print of frame with post-its
One of the main analyses was that the flow was laborious and allowed the user to make mistakes due to usability problems.
2. Competitors
We surveyed the two main competitors and used the graphical value curve tool created by authors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne in the book Blue Ocean Strategy (learn more about this strategy here ). This tool allows for the comparative analysis of a business' values in a simple and objective way.
On the X-Axis, we filled in the value attributes to compare with competitors, and on the Y-Axis, we created a scoring scale. This made it possible to create a comparative chart for later analysis.
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