 Hi, everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening in Vairabhar, in which part of the globe you are joining this webinar. Thanks for once again joining this session. Today I'm going to be covering regarding what is product discovery and product management and what are some of the techniques to do it. And if you have certain frameworks to follow, it would be very valid to do that because you can get some new insights by using some of the frameworks that has been used by many other product managers to discover their product findings. So why? I think this is a valid question that we can constantly ask in everything we do. Why should we do something? And why should we do product discovery? What is the importance of doing product discovery? What would be land as a product manager by doing that? One important thing is new prospects, or you can call it new markets, new customers, new user personas, you can tell anything, it fits into that prospects. So you have a product and you know your audience. Sometimes by discovering and spending more time on your products and maybe even doing some market research, you will understand that you can expand your product maybe to a new customer base, or maybe even start a sub-service within your product which will identify new market. So it totally depends how you want to position yourself. But the idea here is to find more than what you can do in your product. And another reason why it's a good idea to do is you will end up finding something completely new that you have never even imagined about. So new product innovation happens not just by mistake always because it happens by constant experimentation and maybe trying to look things in different perspective. So there are a lot of innovation techniques and probably even frameworks that you can follow in order to start using some of these techniques and identify some new insights about your product and improving products. Ultimately, this is the part that you want to be doing. So as a result of doing the discovery, you want to learn something about your product newly that you can either use or you can at least be sure not to use. So I think that is the piece that you are always thinking about improving products. A lot of times a lot of product managers think shipping a new feature is the most important thing and that improves the product. That's not always true. Just by deprecating something that's not properly used or not even consumed or there's no engagement from your customer or user, that's also equally improving your products. You're making it simple. You're making it intuitive. You're making it easier for them to access something instead of having to go four steps to something. You are making it two steps to something. So improving products does not always mean adding things. It could also be removing things or maybe tweaking certain things that you have that you never even imagined that would change the way how your users see it. So discovery is a continuous process. I think everyone would have seen this at some point and everybody would be thinking, okay, we should do ideation. We should do some sort of assessment. We should experiment. We all know these terms and we all know why this needs to be done. But the question is, how do we start? Where does this start? How do we do it is the question. So basically, discovery is continuous in your daily product management lifecycle. You would be doing something or the other as a part of this. Maybe you are just looking at some data and then you're starting to run some experiments and test some of your ideas or maybe you have such a large feature that's requested by your business side or maybe even your customers or users. But because there's a lot of complexity around it, you might want to just leave a small pilot or maybe just a subset of that feature to test on the users directly whether this is actually valuable. So you might be doing various of these things in different parts of your product management lifecycle. But what is the product discovery lifecycle itself looks like? So first of all, as a PM, you need to actually understand how this whole flow goes. So I would like to, of course, talk about it step by step. So the first thing that you have in your mind as a PM, maybe you're working in a new product, you're working in a mature product or maybe a product that's trying to grow further. There can be always these three categories. If you're a new product, obviously you want to sit down, make a list of questions that you want to ask. Who are you targeting? What do you actually want to do? What does the business want to establish through this product? Who are your stakeholders? What does this product end goal is and how do we earn from this? It could be many different kinds of questions. Similarly, in a mature product, you might be thinking you have reached some sort of like a constant period and you want to see if there are new ways to grow your product or maybe even discover new market. Maybe identify if there are better ways of doing things and maybe you find that your competitor's product is having different ideas that your product doesn't cover. Maybe you want to do something different. So there's an experimentation thought process already in there and you're a product trying to grow. So you know the target audience, you know who you want to land into and you know even your audience that you currently are serving. Maybe you want to improve that for them or maybe add more product lines and services into your product so that you can grow your business. So there are different groups who are trying to do this discovery process and whoever does the most fundamental thing that you have to do is list out all the possible questions that you have in your mind and you need to have this all in a list and this is just for yourself practice to start writing the questions and see somewhere in this whole product life cycle management that you actually covered those open questions. If not, it stays as a question that you want to keep discovering. So make a list of questions that you want to answer in this process and another thing that a lot of PMs tend to do is they try to do the product discovery as an individual thing, which means they start with some questions. They already build a hypothesis. They already want to do some experiments. So then they approach a UX or maybe they go to a senior engineer and ask them, okay, can you come and help me out with this experiment that I have in my mind and we can try to find out the results. So when we involve UX or engineers in the middle way of the process, they don't travel really alone. They don't really know what is running in your mind, what are you trying to solve and maybe if they had participated earlier in the process, they would have suggested something completely different. So it's very important to form a guild, I would say. So if you think that's a great idea, I would suggest you form a guild or form a small team who is going to do this discovery process. And for each of the discovery process, you can involve different engineers by this way. They are also very happy because they know what's like the new discovery item coming and they would also learn about the product in a different perspective because these people are also doing the daily jobs of giving that customer value. So they would actually see in front of their eyes that what's happening in the customer's life. So it's a very nice activity that if you do it on an ongoing basis, it's very good to involve the team. Open questions, opportunities, ideas, you might have basically done probably some research and user surveys, interviews and you would have got some insights somewhere, you would have heard some user feedback and you would have made note of that. Some idea would have popped up already. So first of all, before even thinking that you want to pick up these ideas, the first thing that you want to do is to actually understand what is the value it's going to bring. Your product already is serving a group of customers. It has a certain business goal that you're achieving. When picking up idea, it should not be in contrast to what you do or maybe self-conflicting in some ways. So it has to attach to your business goal or business objective. So it's always good to check that and also check the feasibility of the ideas, which means that some ideas can be really moonshot. It can take a long time to see the value or maybe it's not even relevant for your audience. So you need to understand what ideas you're picking and you have to assess those ideas as well in many different ways. And once you have that, you're going to define the hypothesis or the problem statements that you're going to solve. And this is very crucial because at this point, you have already picked up your ideas and you know what is the value that it's going to bring for you. And at this point, you're just stating what value exactly from A to B, what do you expect that to be? So I think that that is the purpose of doing this. And it can be a very interesting activity because if you have a group of team members for the same idea, you could have two to three different hypotheses that you want to set and test. So it's something exciting if you do it as a group and you'll find that there are so many ideas, so many perceptions for the same idea that you have picked up. And once you have hypothesis and you have problem statements basically defined, I think good idea as the next step is to create prototypes or create some sort of wireframes or any sort of working, small working product or POCs there are different ways to call it. So POC is proof of concept. So you could say anything or some people even call like a little bit of MVP, but I don't prefer calling it MVP because it's not yet actually a working product. So it's totally dependent on what you want to call it, but it's just a small working prototype to be tested on the customers. So testing is like the, I would say the final step of doing that. So you have a working product, you know what it needs to do. You are having all of that hypothesis defined. Whether it meets the hypothesis or your predefined problem statement that you're trying to solve for the customers or the users, you're going to find that out. And if it meets everything, it's great, right? You're going to ship this and you're going to show that there is a value delivered. So it's a great thing. And sometimes you might find that there are some insights that you are not able to make any decision with. You will not get anywhere. You can't say it's a bad idea. It's not a good idea. Maybe it's the idea that it's not working at that moment. So you might want to like redefine your hypothesis and problem statement to test it and find out what it actually means for you. And the next one is, of course, there are ideas that are amazing for other products, but it is not a great idea for your product. So you're basically going to just sunset that or maybe just throw it away because it's not relevant for your audience. So every idea that's amazing for some other product might not be amazing for you. So it's very important to understand that into your product. First of all, it has to, as I mentioned, it has to align with your business goals. And is it really relevant to your audience and does it meet your commercial goals or revenue goals that if your product is the cash cow in the organization, you want to be sure any changes that you launch is not going to negatively influence that. And it's going to have any issues where it is going to self-conflict some of your other features that are more important in your product, absolutely useless. And one other example I would like to give is I was working in an e-commerce web shop and it was related to books and journals and other things. A lot of e-commerce sites, they had the wish list. If you see like normal retail company e-commerce web shops, they'll have like a feature like wish list where you can keep adding things that you potentially want to buy. And this was an amazing idea. Everybody in the team was like, we should try this out. We will see that users will start adding on the wish list and then eventually they will buy stuff. We did a small pilot on that. Actually, the usage was really bad. And the reason is because we found out that the user intent was like either the user personas were more like they were students or professors or maybe like studying individuals who are just looking at that very moment whether they get the content or not through these books or journals and if they don't get, they don't buy it. So they don't sit and research about the product for like several days to buy it. So this is a very good example. It was a very good learning because we understood that even though we thought it's a very nice feature and it is very relevant to our audience because they belong to e-commerce sector. But that was not true because for the nature of business that we had, the users didn't find that useful. They are immediate purchaser of this books and content that we sold on the site. So you really need to understand the audience that you're targeting and how you can make a difference to their life rather than just doing what other competitors do or maybe even your immediate competitor does because they might have different use case and they might have found that is relevant to their audience and not yours. So there are some discovery frameworks and this is something very interesting, jobs to be done. For example, you can do this as an activity for your product, just talk to one of your customer or maybe like another customer, one of your customer or maybe even talk to anybody that you know, like even your colleague, it doesn't have to be about your product. You can ask them maybe like what did they purchase recently that's worth over like $100 or something and you can try to understand like why did they spend that $100 for that product, what made them buy it and it's not about just the process of buying it but you actually try to understand how did they come to and understanding to hire that product. Jobs to be done is like for example, recently I bought a pot and pan, I can describe my situation. So I bought the whole set of pots and pans for cooking and one of the things is why did I do that? Actually, my first intent was that I needed to replace my broken pot, that was my intent and the immediate thing that I saw is like when I went and tried to replace that pot, it costed me like twice the amount to actually repair it and I just said okay, that was not something I'm going to do, I'm not going to spend twice the cost to repair something. So I said okay, I want to replace this pot and I went to the online sites looking for the same brand, similar brands and I found out that that was also expensive, buying one pot was as expensive as buying like seven pots in total as a package. So I ended up buying the entire thing because I thought the rest of the things can also be replaced and I just bought it anyway. So if somebody interviewed me, if somebody from the company came and interviewed me, I would have told the situation and they would immediately basically think okay, my intent was actually not to buy the whole pot set, my intent was to actually replace the broken pot or even more and that's also like so that is the problem that if I don't get a resolution, I might go into another layer of what the competitors are. An example of that is you might go into a supermarket and you might want to buy like bread. The breads are not available anymore, you just think okay, I have to eat my breakfast tomorrow and what am I going to do? What is the other breakfast option? You would think that the the bread options competitor are other breads only but that's not true. The bread competitors are also eggs and maybe like oats or others. So similarly an oatmeal company, they have to think who their competitors are. It's not just other oat company, for them the other competitors are breads, eggs. So they think in a way where you have to satisfy your customer's need that is they have to enjoy their breakfast meal. It does not matter what they are using to replace with that and jobs to be done is similar to that. If you apply this framework to your product, you will understand why the customer or the user is actually coming into your product, their intent to come into your product and how can you engage with them and tell the right story to actually close the deal. So this is a very nice framework to understand different types of users. If you have so many user personas, people doing different things on your site or different things in your application or product, you can definitely try this out. This is absolutely mind blowing framework. There are many good guidances that are available and I would definitely recommend trying that. Design thinking is also like a discovery framework and I think design thinking is also like is an upcoming framework that everybody wants to use. I would say that always try to understand what product you are in, what is the end goal that you want to steer your product into, what framework works best for you is something you as a product manager should judge. It should not be the market telling you design thinking is the best thing, jobs to be done is the best thing or any other. So it's totally dependent on what you want to do. You can even try out everything and you see what works best for you and then go for it. So design thinking is definitely good and this is similar to the process that I have described earlier. So you basically understand your customers, you empathize, you basically go into their shoes and try out things which means that you sit with them, you chat or you spend time with them to understand what are they exactly doing in your product? How do they use your product and stuff? So one of the very interesting thing that I want to mention is, for example, in recent days, I think some of you would have read this research. So in Amazon, for example, they saw that they actually suggest products that has to be sold together. For example, if you buy like balloon for birthday party, they would probably suggest like candles and other things that they can automatically combine. So basically, they looked at all these algorithms that they were doing for all the products. They found a very strange combination. So they found that a lot of people were buying camera and then they were also buying like a camera to check security camera actually. And then they also saw that they were buying like baby products. And then they were very curious like what is going on here? What does a security camera have to do with like this combo of buying some baby products? When they dig further and when they did some user research, they found out the security cameras are actually being used for baby monitors. So the company that sells like a cheap security camera with an app. So basically, these companies were trying to understand what was going on. So they asked them, what's happening? So why are they buying? So they would get like receipts where they can look at these things. So they basically created a curiosity. So basically, you have to assume that your users or your customers are way more creative than you are. So I think that's why the empathy element is so valuable because you will try to understand how your users actually consume your product. So that's possible only if you spend enough time with your customers or users and be in their shoe and start looking at things in their perspective. So then you will start to think very differently from how you're doing it as of today. So that contributes to some of the ideas and you can build prototypes and test. So user service and data. I think this is like a discovery framework that almost every product managers will use. And user surveys are usually very valuable because you will probably have like a net promoter score or anything of that sort to measure your customer satisfaction, which is a great idea. You must do it. You should do it on an ongoing basis because you can find any sort of major red flags through these because your customers who are really willing to be part of this product, they will take an effort to answer these questions that you ask on an ongoing basis and give you some new insights as well or maybe some major red flags that you don't see because you are in your product shoes every day. So they are your users, they are customers, they'll give you some new insights and data. Data is also very crucial. So you can look everything in so many different ways and data is one of the forms. So I think this is also purely valuable and some of these ideas can be picked as quickly as from the service and the data insights that you get from a product. You don't even have to do like all of that complicated framework, but I still recommend doing those because that can be very insightful and valuable for you in a long run and what is obtained as a result of this whole activity of product discovery. I would say that because you have a constant relationship with your customers and your users, they will start to see what you are trying to make it happen for them. So it builds better trust on you as well as your products and they will start to give honest opinion or honest feedback on your product and this builds a long-term relation and very good belief on your product and this will go far long than you think. And customer journey is discovered. So a lot of times that we work as product managers, we think we know our customers really well, we know that they're going to click A and then they're going to land into B and then they're going to land into C, but it might not be the case, they might go from A to Z to B to X to anything. So they react to things, they respond to things very differently than we think. So this might be very good exercise for us to do to understand what is the customer journey look like, who is doing what and what is like the outcome they are trying to get from that and also what's the benefit of that outcome. It's not just the outcome of that action. By doing that action, they probably are going to get some benefit that we are not aware of. So it's very good to understand these kind of things in that customer journey and prototype learnings. I think when you actually build a prototype and you test it, you will find out that as I told the very valuable example of how your customers are very creative. So you will find out that when you test your ideas, your customers will do things very differently than what you thought. You might think that they might press in application, you would expect them to go and press on a dropdown and then click, rather they would do something completely different from what you had thought. So it's really good to understand what is the outcome of that prototype, how are your users actually grasping some of the concepts that you wanted to land. So that can be extremely valuable as well as a part of this process. And user persona understanding. So as I mentioned, the very first part of the call, so user personas, you might think all your user personas in your product, you know, every one of them and you might think that I know how they are using my product. But when you do these product discovery activities, you might find out that you can also serve more user personas than what you are serving. Or maybe you might find out that there is a specific user persona who don't fit well into your product. And by serving those customers, serving those users, you actually conflict with other user personas. So it gives you new insights and you can make your decision according to that. You really want to continue with that user persona, serving that user persona, or maybe adding new personas. It's really valuable to find those insights. So this is it about the product discovery. I would say that all of these concepts, when you do it on a daily basis or even you could do it as some sort of like an innovation sprint with your team members and your colleagues, this will bring a lot of new insights. And I'm very confident that you're going to love it. So thanks again for joining this session. And please do write some questions and feedback. I will definitely take that into account and keep answering your questions. Thank you.