Every product starts with a great idea, but getting that idea off the ground is easier said than done. To bring your idea to life — and to transform or grow your business in the process — you need to make sure that you, your team, and your external partners have done your research, planned ahead, and accounted for potential risks.
It’s critical that you properly analyze your market and plan your product management accordingly. In fact, the top five causes of project failure — changing priorities, changing objectives, inaccurate requirements, inadequate vision, and poor communication — are all avoidable mistakes that businesses and their partners can overcome by doing their homework ahead of time.
Product discovery ensures that key stakeholders go into the development process with a shared understanding of what they’re there to do. While it’s natural for clients to want to skip this process to save time and money, experience has taught us that product discovery actually saves clients resources in the long run. By doing due diligence now, you can avoid emergencies down the line and set up your business for market success in the future.
While some teams focus on project management, we focus on product management. Product management assesses monetization strategies, value propositions, user targeting, critical requirements, and more, all of which are essential to building — and successfully completing — digital tools that can meet business expectations.
Product discovery, which happens at the onset of a development project, works to bring these variables into alignment. At this stage of the product development lifecycle, product discovery helps to:
With these goals in mind, product discovery allows teams to better understand their target industry, users, and problems. Doing so empowers them to define how a product should meet user needs and design solutions specifically targeted to those market demands. In this way, product discovery is a way to evaluate why you’re building a product just as much as how.
Product discovery is an essential step toward building a successful and competitive product for your market. However, product development comes with its fair share of risks. According to a study by Geneca, 80% of business and IT executives admit that they spend at least half of their time reworking their product.
By taking a business approach to building a technical product, teams can minimize the risk of spending time and resources on unnecessary features or going back to the drawing board. For clients with a tight budget and small overhead, this is a must.
In a study by Innotas, over 55% of IT professionals reported having a failed product and 54% said their projects were not well-aligned with their business goals. With product discovery, key stakeholders can ensure that they have a shared vision for what they want their product to do, how it will fit into the marketplace, and how these will all fit together in a substantive way.
Once the product discovery process has yielded a thorough understanding of your needs, you’ll be better positioned to put together your development plans. Thanks to homework done ahead of time, you’ll be able to undertake roadmapping, story mapping, SWOT analysis, risk mapping, and wireframe design — and get it all done right the first time.
Product discovery is an ongoing process, one that happens alongside key development processes and product evolution. At VentureDevs, our product discovery workshops are custom-tailored to our clients’ needs and take into account your unique market positioning, project requirements, and more.
By opting for an experienced technology partner with proven experience in product development, you’ll be setting up your business for lasting success. To get your next great idea off the ground — starting with a thorough product discovery process — reach out to VentureDevs today.