 Hello, everyone. My name is Amrita Malik. I'm a product manager in a fintech space, having years of experience in designing and launching many payment products for multiple markets. Today, I'm excited to be here to be able to discuss one of the most interesting topic that is product discovery with the users of product school. Let's take a deep dive into what is product discovery? Why do we need product discovery? What are the various product discovery techniques or frameworks we can use? Product discovery in a very simple terms is a way to deeply understand our customer needs. What are their pain points, and what is the right product we should build to solve for their pain points? Product discovery, undoubtedly, is one of the most challenging yet a very important phase in the product lifecycle. Obviously, we all want to build the right product, but we want to make sure that we are building the product which solves the real problem of the customer. It is being built and right in the time so that it's launched in the market and it's possible to build within the existing infrastructure that the company has and the resources the company has. Product discovery has two key elements. At a very high level, A, you have a very deep understanding of your customers. Who are your customers? What is your target segment? What do they want? What are their needs? Then you collect all the data and information to build a product that will solve for their needs. Product discovery will help you flesh all such ideas and then help you to prioritize the most impactful idea for the customer to be able to launch into the market. However, being always user-centric, focused on their needs, and having a flexibility to prioritize your features to solve for what's the most important feature is the path to build a very successful product. We will talk about why product discovery is essential. I mean, we will look at multiple things, what it will give if you do product discovery versus, what will you miss if you don't do product discovery. With this picture over here, you can see in a very simple way we have idea coming from market based on customer needs, product discovery that's happening within a time frame, that's providing you prioritize requirements for the development team. The development team builds the product and the product is launched to the market. That is the at a very high level overall structure of the product. Now, doing the product discovery, what we want to make sure is a product team is building valuable product for the company and valuable product for the customer. A valuable product for a company means, yes, it is solving the needs for the customer at the same time. It's not wasting resources in terms of budget, in terms of team, team's time, development team's time or stakeholder times. At the same time, the idea we are working on is the idea that we should be solving for. It is an idea which has been raised by the customers as a need. We shouldn't be putting our time into product that nobody wants. Even if you build one of the most fancy product and have all the great UI and have great processes, if the customer doesn't want to use it, it wouldn't be of no value. So we want to make sure that we are delivering something that is important. This is what product discovery does, it ensures that the product and the technology teams are working on the right product idea. So let's call out few things that will help us understand, what are the things we will achieve if we do an effective product discovery? So yes, we would be able to better articulate what is the value of the product or feature. It will help us how it's going to help the customer. It's going to tell us how it will impact, how we can make our product better, and it will also help us put together a budget request because we will know the size of our opportunity. Product discovery will also help us understand our budget needs and also have been reducing the cost and likelihood of a budget overrun. So once we know what our customer needs, we can prioritize and the cut effort and cut effort that won't deliver value. This is where we do the MVP. We don't want to deliver things that's not at most required. Hence, we will put our budget into their features that's the top most priority. Again, at the same time, we will deliver better value within the same budget. So product discovery, which will help in prioritization and because we understand the customer, the market and the problem better, the prioritization will help us deliver a high value feature within the budget. At the same time, we will also be making sure we are not wasting our budget on bad ideas. By doing product discovery, we are able to validate whether this an idea is a viable idea or not, whether it's worth pursuing or not. This saves the company for developing or maintaining products that's not going to be used. And again, it will keep the product team focused on the right track. Increase on prices. So if you are developing a right product, you will end up defining the right product, the right pricing strategy for your product. Product discovery will help you understand the true value of your product. And once you understand what are the key functionalities that are the top most value to your customer, you will be able to price them accurately. And that's where you can start gaining fees from the customer, which will contribute as the revenue from that product. Uncover better use of funds. Product discovery often invalidates the initial idea, but it will uncover other ideas that could be more valuable. Once we start doing the research, we might think that the idea which we started with is not as significant as the other facts that we discovered while doing the discovery. And hence, it also presents us with a list of new opportunities which could be either equally important or maybe higher equivalent. And hence, we can then prioritize the other ideas that we figured out as a path of doing the discovery. We also discovered our risks. So once we know this is the product we want to develop, we have built our assumptions and we have built a list of our risks, which we were not aware of initially. And then we have a chance to validate each of our risks and assumptions and ensure that we can address them in the right time in order to build a successful product. In the end, our focus is customer. So we want to make sure we are developing the product for the right customer. So we want to impress our customers who are in need of this product. And we do not want to focus on the customer segment for which we are not building this product. Hence, we also would know that we are rightly targeting the right customer. Again, the benefits of a right product discovery will help our stakeholders and also help the organization drivers. Now let's talk about a few of the points. What will you miss if you don't do product discovery? So at a very high level, you are gonna build a product that doesn't solve the problem of the customer that you were targeting because customers never had that particular problem. So you will end up spending your time, your colleagues who are gonna support you from a development standpoint or launch standpoint. And at the end of the day, the product will not be used. You will then end up securing more budget because you didn't build the product, the right product at the first stage. And so now, because of the learnings you have gathered now, you will have to request for additional budget to improvise it or to fix it in order to solve for the real pain points of the customer. If you're not building the right product, you are never going to gain customers. Your customers will leave the product because it never solved for their needs. Hence, you will not end up having a good customer review. At the end, you will try to be everything for everyone and end up doing nothing for no one. Without knowing exactly who you are targeting, what do they need? You might end up putting your focus in different direction and might not create a meaningful product. So let's talk about what are the times when we need a product discovery? So product discovery is definitely required when there are a lot of unknowns. When we don't know what we have to build, for whom we have to build and why do we have to build product? What are the risks associated with building with this product? What would be our budget like? What kind of resources we need? So we may end up solving a problem that might have already been solved and we don't want to waste our time or resources in any manners, but certain situations where discovery is definitely needed are A, when you have a new opportunity, when you're looking to expand your business, you want to launch your product in a different country or you will want to now target a different customer segment. At that time, you would need a discovery in order to launch for any of those new opportunities. It will require a lot of research around the target audience, competitors in the market, scope, opportunity size, and this is what the product discovery will give you. When you're coming with a brand new idea of building a product from the scratch that has been in your mind, but you don't know what are the right features to build and when you do product discovery, that's what you will gather. What is the right customer segment? What are their needs? What are their preferences? And this product discovery will focus on the problem space of the customer and then you will build exactly what the customer needs. Then comes sometimes we have an existing product which is out there in market doing fairly well, but you have heard through the voice of customer that these are the additional features they need. Then again, you would need to do a product discovery so that you know what is the exact kind of upgrades or additional features they need, why they need, what is the scope of that particular advancement and how you can build it. Then there are times when companies go through mergers, positions and there's a lot of consolidation that needs to happen at the time again. A lot of discovery is required to understand both the parties and to come up with a solution that merges both of the organizations or the systems or the processes. Until you understand both side of the systems, you can never have them integrated and product discovery will help you in that direction. During the product discovery phase, the product team understands user problem and have some significant ideas of the solution that they can provide to take the product forward. Sometimes the discovery will tell you about additional issues that you would identify in the path of discovery that you might take along with you and sometimes the discovery will also tell you it is not the right path to move ahead and this is not a viable product or a functionality that you need to build. So when you have to do a product discovery, ask some questions to yourself. This will give you an idea of which direction your product needs to go. There are so many questions, but I have listed a few of them here which will help you get the visual frame of the product in your mind. Let's think of the product from a business space. A, what is the value the product adds to your business, your business in terms of the organization you are in? Or maybe as a part of being there for the enterprise, what value does it bring to the larger organization, to the company? Does it align with your business goals? Is it a part of your strategic roadmap? Do you have a roadmap to build this product? Can you monetize on this product? Are you aware of any challenges in this product? And how will you monitor or monitor the KPIs? What are the KPIs to monitor the success? How will you track them? And what is going to be the cost of the development? These are very critical points to understand from a business standpoint when you are starting a product delivery. Then comes the problem. So let's assume you have a problem that you have to solve for a customer. You have to understand crystal clear, what is that problem? Who are those users who are facing it? What is the definition of that user? What are the user segments that's facing it? What is the volume of those users that's facing this problem? What are the demographics of the target customers? And how they are trying to address this problem currently. This will give you an understanding of what are the steps they have to take in order to achieve the output for which you are trying to build a very intuitive and digital product. And what tools or features your customers are looking to have in order to ease their interaction or ease up their process or functionality for which they're looking into a product. This will give you a very clear understanding of what is the problem space. Now, let's talk about a few things that we should ask from a solution perspective. There are so much technical options through which you can solve for a problem. But the one that fits you, your company, within your budget and timeline is the one that you should be looking at. Your technology team will help you provide multiple options. But these are some of the questions you should be focusing on. What does the user doesn't like in the current solution? Because they do have a solution if the product already exists. Has any other product team or any technology team within the company have already solved the same problem? Is it something that is available ready as a utility? Or even as a third party tool that you can add to your existing product to solve for the customer pain points? How many users will be really using this product? Obviously, you're not gonna make a product if you have maybe less than 100 customers. So what's the volume? And what are the issues in creating this product from a solution standpoint? Is the solution that you're looking for, is it even feasible within the company structure you are in? And why do you think the customers will use your product leaving behind the product they have it now or maybe when they are using some of the company's product? What is the value proposition over there? And if you do end up making this product, what value will it add to the life of the customer? These are the questions that will help you understand every aspect of the product right from a business point of view to the problem point of view and also having a focus on the solutioning center. Let's look at the discovery process over here. It's a very beautiful image where we have users, we have a lot of ideas coming from the users which are also in terms of call us needs. And this is a discovery team which is doing the product discovery. Product discovery is continuously analyzing those ideas to come up with one feasible idea or maybe there is no feasible idea but that's what they are, they are churning. Then they are taking the valuable insights and forming up the concept of the product definition. And here the delivery team and the discovery team are working together to provide a valuable and a useful product to the users. This is at a very high level of discovery and how it helps at the end the users. When you will be doing a product discovery, it not only helps you validate your idea but it will help you come up with certain data points, certain level of documentation, certain identification that will support your end-to-end product development as well. As a result of the discovery you will do, there will be many data points that you will gather and record that will support if you're building a web application or even a mobile application. So definitely you will end up achieving a well-defined problem statement and you will define the user journey maps. You will have how the customer is using your product, how the journey starts from point A and goes all the way to the end of the functionality. User needs statements, service blueprint, different user personas. What are the different user personas that will be interacting with your product? It's just not only the users who are interacting. You will also have somebody coming from either operations team. You will also have people looking at it from an auditing perspective. So different users will be a part of the play in this product. You will also come up with business value propositions and a high level wire friends. The outcome of the product discovery will give you these artifacts to keep on evaluating and keep refining it as you proceed further. At the same time, it will also help you understand the risks. Let's look into the four main risks I have categorized here. Value risks, A, whether the customer will buy it or user will choose to use it. Usability risk, whether user can figure out how to use it. How simple it is to use. What level of intuitiveness your product is carrying that will help the user to figure out by themselves. Feasibility, whether our engineers can build it what we need within the time, skill, and the technology we have. And at the end, business liability risk, whether the solution also works for various aspects of the business. These are few of the points that your discovery process will help you in understanding and achieving data points that will provide a detailed enough information on how to take the product into the next stage of development. There are various product discovery techniques. Some of them are fairly popular. A lot of us use it. You and I have used it in the past. And some of them kind of a very specific need based. Not all the product would be using all the kind of techniques. They're based on the nature of the product they would be using a technique. I will be going into two techniques or the frameworks that I have myself used for my payment products. And no matter which framework you use at the end of the day, the discovery stage should help you come to a point where you have a very clear understanding of your customer needs, the problem they're facing, and a very clear idea on how your product will be overcoming those challenges. So let's go into one or two of the frameworks that I have been using myself. This is a very commonly used framework. It is called design thinking. It's a framework for innovation. Here we have steps, empathize. So it is focused on understanding the needs of the customer. What do they need? What are the pain points? Put yourself into the customer shoes and think from their point of view. What are the things that you would be requiring from that product if you would be the user? Then comes the define. Innovation should solve problem. You should take the entire data that you have gathered, think of it, of the data points and empathize with the user. Think of it or build a visual diagram and try to form the issues the customer is facing with the data points you have collected. Then ideate. Innovation is born from a clash of ideas. This stage is all about many ideas as possible. You will list on all the points that will answer to this problem. It can be a feature that can help solve this. It could be a large functionality which is by product itself, but these are the ideas you will put. And these are the ideas you will be taking to your stakeholders to get their opinion. Maybe out of the five ideas you created, your stakeholders will help you point into maybe one or two ideas that everybody feels is a viable path to go forward. Then comes the prototype stage. Build a prototype. Build two to three different prototypes. Take it for test. Take your prototype to users. Actual users, you're gonna use the product. Let them use. Gather their feedback. Record their feedback. Improvise your prototype. At the end, pick one prototype that is the one your product could be building. Next. Lean Business Model Canvas. This is another very basic product design framework that helps you put your problem statement at a very high level. So this is a framework. You can get this template obviously from the internet, but if you look at the various sections, it helps you capture each and every segment of a product definition into one canvas. Problems. List your customers top three problems. So here you will be listing the areas you are trying to solve for. Then there's existing alternatives. You will be also looking at how these problems are solved today. How are the customers getting or meeting their needs today when they don't have this product or maybe they have an alternative product that they're using, which they are not having. Then solution. What are the different solutions you can think of for these problem statements? Key metrics. You're going to list all those metrics that you are going to track once you've launched the product to see how your product is doing. It's very critical that you want to know how your product is performing. Unique Value Proposition. It's a very single and a clear message that turns an unaware visitor into an interested prospect. How are you going to appeal to the customer? How are you going to make a prospect to your customer and then how you're going to make that customer as a sticky customer? How will you make sure that the customer is a repeat user for product? That is a unique value proposition. High-level concept. List your analogy. For example, look at both the sides, define your X and Ys and do the comparison for the concepts. Then look at the channels in which you're going to have your product, whether it's going to be a web-based product, a mobile-based product, if in mobile, what kind of on which operating systems you want to launch it? Or is it just going to be a service-based product, maybe just API-based? And maybe look at unfair advantage, something that cannot be easily copied or bought. Definitely we cannot miss our focus from the customer segment. You have to define your customer. You have to mention clearly who the customers are, what is their demographic they're coming from, what is their background, what are they from their needs segment, what does that target customer define it? And then also define who is going to be an ideal customer. You know from this large customer base, a portion of this customer, which fits into this demographic or this target area are definitely going to be adopters. Make sure you target them first. So you have to put the definition of the early adopters. And at the end, do not miss your cost structure that's going to be costing to build this product. And most importantly, what are the sources of revenue? How you are going to be monetizing from this product? So if you use these two templates to do start your discovery phase, this will be very helpful. There are other frameworks which I have mentioned and you can get templates for these frameworks on the internet and you can use if that suits your product needs. At the end, product discovery is an iterative process. You have to focus on the customer, the customer needs and outline an end-to-end journey for the customer at the same time keeping the processes simple, digital and instantaneous. Thank you. I enjoyed speaking with all of you and you guys have a great day.