Continuous product discovery best practices & tips

If you’re committed to making optimal products for customers, paying attention to what customers want and need is essential.

But how can you truly understand what will surprise and delight customers? Continuous product discovery is a practice that can make all the difference.

Continuous product discovery steps beyond assumptions and guesswork. It enables your team to bring customers into the product development process, ensuring that everything you create is designed and developed with the customer in mind.

Continuous product discovery is the practice of bringing customers into the product development process to ensure you fulfill their wants, needs, and preferences.

It involves continually gaining customer data and feedback to validate ideas, launch customer-centric products, and optimize outcomes.

Continuous product discovery involves:

• User-centricity: the focus of continuous product discovery is making customers a part of the product development process—in other words, to create products centered around customers.

• Engagement: you’ll need to engage with customers and gain feedback from them to deeply understand their pain points, preferences, and needs. This will unlock relevant data and actionable insights.

• Ideation testing: while your team may feel they have a brilliant idea, the only ideas that will work in the marketplace are those your customers genuinely want and need. The only way to know what your customers want is to work with them to test possible solutions and release the best product.

• Data-driven decisions: product discovery can help your team move beyond guesswork to make decisions backed by reliable data.

• Optimization: even after products launch, your team is still committed to optimizing and iterating to ensure they’re the best they can be.

Product discovery asks customers what they want and need and then seeks to provide products that offer tailored solutions for them.

In contrast, the traditional method has often involved producing ideas based on things like:

• Brainstorming sessions that don’t consider the customer

• The general whims of senior managers

• The loudest voices

• General observations that aren’t backed by data

The issue in all these cases is that the customer can easily get left behind.

In product discovery, the customer comes to the forefront of your team members’ minds. The customer’s needs, preferences, wants, and pain points are prioritized as products are created and improved over time.

This user-centric approach has a range of benefits.

Adapting to your customers’ changing needs

As technology advances and changes, so does what customers want and need. Statistics show that 65% of customers expect organizations to continually adapt to their changing preferences and needs.

To stay competitive, you and your team will need to keep iterating and optimizing your products so that your customers’ needs are continually met (and even exceeded).

Taking advantage of new opportunities and trends

By continually paying attention to data and feedback, you’re better equipped to take advantage of trends and new market opportunities.

Promoting feature prioritization

What are the things your customers need and want from you most right now? The only way to answer this question is via customer insights gained directly from them.

To know which features to prioritize and other key iterations to make, you must pay close attention to what customers are telling you. Product discovery makes this possible.

To implement continuous product discovery techniques in your organization, adhere to the following guidelines:

Set clear goals

All successful projects begin with clear, actionable goals. These goals should be aligned with the overall business strategy to ensure that anything you do helps the organization take a step closer to fulfilling its mission.

Promote customer-centricity

Customer-centricity is a business approach that puts the customer at the center of all your organization’s decisions and activities.

Take steps to promote a customer-centric culture within your business to get all stakeholders on board. This will ensure that everyone has the same intention—to create the best possible customer experiences.

Do user research and gain customer feedback

There’s only one way to know what your customers prefer, and that’s through reliable data.

It’s just as essential to gather direct and indirect data from early-stage users as it is from loyal customers. This will help you understand what your customers need and how you can provide the best possible solutions for them.

You can gain data from various sources, including the following:

• Surveys

• Usability testing

• User interviews

• Analytics

• Heatmaps

• Call center notes

• Social media monitoring

Gain actionable insights

Once data is collected, you’ll need to sort, categorize, and analyze it to get actionable insights. You can then identify any emerging trends or common themes to help you focus on what to deliver next.

Leverage insights

Once you have actionable insights, your team can leverage them to make iterations, improvements, and optimizations to products that are yet to launch and those you have already released.

Ask for feedback

After improvements have been made, ask for further feedback from customers to understand how your changes have helped them. They might even tell you that your updates have done more harm than good!

This is the aspect of product discovery that is continuous. It ensures the customer is always included in the process and that continual improvements can be made.

To give product discovery the best chance of success, keep these best practices in mind:

• Make data-driven decisions: all decisions should revolve around data (not assumptions or guesswork). This means that every choice and change you make is validated and more likely to meet customer expectations.

• Think about your customer first: product discovery revolves around the customer—their wants, needs, and pain points. You might have what you think is a great idea for a feature, but persisting with the idea is futile if customers don’t actually need or want it.

• Be open to change: continuous product discovery relies on having an iterative mindset and culture. This involves constantly looking out for new possibilities and ways to improve for the benefit of customers. Sometimes, that will mean going in directions that you didn’t set out to pursue. Just be open-minded. You’ll be more likely to develop solutions that fit a market need.

• Use advanced tools: to speed up the process, use advanced tools to collect, analyze, and store data. Advanced tools will prevent your team from relying entirely on manual processes, which can prove sluggish and sometimes inaccurate.

Product discovery is usually a collaborative process between various product team members.

Here are some of the key job titles you might hear involved in this process:

• Product managers typically lead the product discovery process, setting out the vision and strategy and helping drive the practice forward.

• Researchers gather and analyze data from customers through interviews, focus groups, surveys, analytics, and more.

• UX and UI designers use actionable insights as part of their knowledge base to create engaging, innovative, and satisfying experiences for users.

• Developers use customer insights to technologically implement the designed solutions and release them to customers.

Consider some continuous product discovery examples to help you understand how it works in practice.

Think about the popular meditation and relaxation app Calm. The Calm product team is known for continuously discovering customer insights to implement improvements and new features in their offering.

This can be seen through:

• A central customer focus: understanding customers’ mental health needs to deliver the best experiences for them

• Clinical studies: involvement in clinical studies to deeply understand how the app impacts customers

• Customer research: performing research to understand exactly what customers need from the app so they can address their needs more closely—for example, understanding that some users come to their app to deal with anxiety rather than just to meditate

• Regularly releasing new features: for example, the progress tracker on the app homepage, which helps users easily track their meditation progress and success

Try to be flexible and empathetic to get the most out of your continuous product discovery efforts. Always advocate for your customers. Here’s a breakdown of the skills you should focus on:

• Empathy: this is an essential skill if you want your users to get what they want and need from your product offering. This can help your team step into the end user’s shoes to truly understand their perspective.

• Customer advocacy: stand up for the voice of your customers to ensure that their needs are baked into products at each step.

• Flexibility: customer feedback and insights may tell you that your customers prefer a direction your team hasn’t planned on going in. For example, you may have just developed a new feature and expected, based on early findings, that it would perform well. But what users thought they wanted wasn’t the case in practice. If something isn’t performing well, you’ll need to be flexible and continually make data-led changes and decisions.

• Embrace continuous change: to succeed in product discovery, you’ll need to be willing to be in a continuous state of flux. A product is never truly complete in product discovery.

Product discovery requires constant feedback from customers—otherwise, you won’t be able to embed their wants and needs into products. Various tools can help you streamline and speed up this process.

1. SurveyMonkey: surveys are a popular and effective way to quickly gather insights directly from users. SurveyMonkey is a streamlined platform you can use to gain customer feedback.

2. UserTesting: this tool offers access to a diverse range of users with whom you can test your products. UserTesting unlocks key insights that can help you improve your return on investment (ROI) over time.

3. Hotjar: in-app feedback with Hotjar allows users to report their thoughts, feelings, and preferences through surveys, polls, and session recordings while they use your apps.

4. Google Analytics: this free analytics service offers detailed information that can help build a picture of customer behavior. Use Google Analytics to gain data on how users interact with your website and app.

5. Trello: a project management tool like Trello can help you manage the product lifecycle and ensure customer insights inspire product iterations.

6. Dovetail: advanced product feedback software Dovetail allows you to house customer data from multiple sources, analyze feedback, gain actionable insights, and act quickly to drive customer growth and boost revenue.

A product outcome is a measurable (or noticeable) change in customer behavior or business metrics that results from a product release or iteration. Put simply, product outcomes are how well a product performs in the marketplace.

Continuous product discovery can help boost your chances of having positive product outcomes. 

Let’s say your users are abandoning your app because they think its layout is confusing. The product discovery process can help reveal this feedback to you and your team. When you know what users find confusing about the layout, you can decide how to improve it and give them a better experience.

Product discovery will put your team at an advantage when it comes to creating customer-centric products that continually meet and exceed customer needs.

Product discovery can be used at all phases of the product development process, from ideation to design, development, release, and optimization.