User discovery is the first and most critical step in bringing a product to life. However, throughout my career, I’ve found it to also be the most vastly misunderstood and underappreciated phase of the product development lifecycle. 

I’m not blaming Agile frameworks like Scrum and Kanban directly for this, although, they have contributed to a culture of rapid and constant delivery of code into a live environment. This is what the whole product and tech world has been fixated on for over the last 5-10 years or so. 

With the introduction of the Product Owner who serves to sit as a backlog admin who spends hours on end in internal meetings and writing tickets to feed the development team with work, the end result often comes to this:

‘80% of customers only use 20% of the features in the software they buy.’

Why don't so many product teams solve actual user pain points?

They validate through expensive and time-consuming high code MVPs 

The incipient phase comes with the specific success pressure and tends to overlook the fundamentals that needed to be checked, thus creating too detailed MVPs that result in ambiguous usability test results.

They lack investment in the discovery phase

Excessive focus on churning features, as opposed to solving real user problems and needs.

Internal management dynamics are out of sync with the Product Management team

To avoid risking the overall value of the product, PM teams might need to push back on senior leadership’s new feature integrations in order to preserve the value-oriented development rhythm.

‘Success’ doesn’t mean what it should

There is a lack of focus on end results/outcomes. Success is mere delivery of features, validating user empowerment is more than that. Does your end-product solve the user’s needs? Does its tech functionality align with the ‘why’ of your product?

Time-consuming and NOT RELEVANT SYNONYM - VOLATILE user interview

The challenge is to follow a methodology that best portrays a balance between the objective tech aspects but also their subjective experience of the user. The subjectivity of interviewing users creates a risk of never really understanding our user personas.

Product Management and Engineering Teams are left to be eaten by the wolves. They must deliver everything and fulfill all customer desires. Collaboration with sales, marketing, customer success, finance, etc is often limited. They don’t collaborate towards ensuring they are geared to validate key strategic hypotheses together or even launch a new product/big feature effectively in unison.

What can companies do to easily implement validation in the incipient phase of their development?

Bearing all this In mind, there are things companies can do to give themselves the best chance possible of unearthing key insights and connecting with their user base. Here are some of the tools and practices you should look to embed within your organization to level up your user discovery efforts:

Start with micro surveys

They’re an easy and quick quantitative validation with no development involvement (after initial setup). A great starting point to get a gut feeling of a hypothesis and pick out some users who you could potentially do further discovery with. 

There are a ton of tools out there that are quite cheap and cheerful, for example, Refiner and Qualaroo.

Have in-app guides with CTAs to assess interest in your new grand idea

A nice subtle way to share new features and release updates and then throw in a question. e.g. ‘Do you want to see our new workflow automation feature?’ 

Even if this feature doesn’t exist, it’s a great opportunity to see if any interest exists from users who actually follow your product updates and releases indicating a strongly invested interest in your product

Build features around the hook model 

Experiment with new hooks to gauge interest e.g. ‘send SMS”. Even if this send SMS button doesn’t trigger a backend service, this is a great indicator to show that users expect to see such functionality exist within that context. 

As documented by the genius that is Nir Eyal: encourage users to start a new goal once one has been completed. 

Use tools to easily manipulate the HTML and CSS on the UI 

In this phase, the ease of experimenting and adjusting according to the results is crucial. Even if in the upcoming phases development is a clear differentiator, here you could play with the existing tools to comfortably alter the copywriting and add fake buttons/elements with some segmentation using feature flags. 

Take a look at A/B Tasty and VWO.

Set up landing pages 

To assess interest and easily measure the enthusiasm towards your product, set up landing pages in your app and on your public site.

Check lets deel which has ‘OpenAPI’ as one of their product offerings on their burger menu. When you click on ‘OpenAPI’, it takes you to a landing sign-up page to join the waiting list.

Be where your prospects are 

Where are your potential customers spend their time out? Expos, community forums, social media groups, industry events, etc. 

Yes, I’ve mentioned some cool pieces of tech to help you make some greater inroads. However, do not discount the value of some good tried and tested in-person techniques which can often unearth great insights. 

You must always have a strong presence using your sales, marketing, and customer success teams to be with your target personas wherever they hang out.

Create a community around your product 

Communities nowadays have definitely met different ways of connecting whether we are talking forums or steering groups.

One of my favorite tools to support this (which is actually free and really easy to use) is Canny.io. You can create tickets on different subjects for anyone in your userbase to provide feedback on and upvote. An added bonus is you can assign statuses to these tickets to create a public roadmap! 

Check out how this no-code start-up Passion.io use this great tool to give them a competitive advantage. 

This is by no means a definitive list, however, this is just to give readers a flavor of some of the investment in processes, people, and tools needed to give user discovery the focus it needs. 

It’s time to add some rocket fuel to user insights to allow you to build kick-a#s products that truly resonate with your user base and their needs!

About the Author

Muhammed Zaulifqar is an experienced Product Manager, Leader, product development, and validation enthusiast. His experience brings to the surface consistent insight about creating products in start-ups, global tech, ed-tech, utilities, e-commerce, and telco.

Follow him on Linkedin | Read his articles on Medium | Book a product mentoring session with him

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