5 reasons why Continuous Discovery is the new standard in product development

New standard in product development: continuous discovery

So far, product discovery has usually been applied to product development in fits and starts (if it has been applied at all). The majority of development companies used to neglect it, so it hasn’t been used as a continuous process parallel to product delivery. It has rather been just used here and there, mostly at the initial stages of product creation or upon product pivots.

Now, this is slowly changing. The best product development companies have recently implemented continuous discovery as part of their product building services. This is becoming a new standard and predictions are that in the very near future there will be no good product development without a continuous discovery process. Companies that keep ignoring this trend will simply lag behind competitors and lose their chance for successful performance in the tech market.

Why does product discovery need continuity?

The world we live in is quite turbulent and full of unexpected events. It’s called a VUCA world as it’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. These words already expose its nature and you’ve probably experienced some of the consequences of such a reality. In product development we often have to face challenges that are directly linked with economic and political conditions. It’s all connected. Pandemic, war, inflation - everything potentially influences user behavior, needs, expectations, and activity. It may force you to rethink your product, or restructure your business strategy.

To stay on track, to know what’s changed, to observe users’ situations, product teams need to stay in direct touch with them. In order to stay connected, they should talk to them on a daily basis. This is why product discovery needs continuity. It should be applied as a continuous process that is carried out simultaneously with product delivery.

What is continuous discovery in digital product development?

Continuous product discovery is an ongoing process of conducting research, gathering user feedback, and running experiments in order to inform product development decisions. This is how world-class product discovery expert, Teresa Torres, describes it:

In short, [continuous] product discovery is a process that helps product teams refine their ideas by deeply understanding real user problems and then landing on the best way to solve them. (…) Too many people frame discovery as a linear process. You start a new project, you learn about your target customer, you map out the problem space, and you move on to generating and evaluating solutions. If only the world were that neat and tidy. Discovery is messy. It’s non-linear. Good discovery is continuous. The day we stop being curious about our customers is the day our competitors start catching up.

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5 reasons why continuous discovery is a new product development standard

There are numerous benefits that continuous discovery can bring to your product and business. Let’s look at some of them. Here are five reasons why it’s almost impossible nowadays to build good digital products without implementing continuous discovery.

1. Continuous discovery helps you see the background of “why” of your product

The main questions of product delivery are usually what needs to be built and how. Meanwhile product discovery gives an answer to why it needs to be built. The answers to these questions give the product team a deep understanding of what the users’ real problems and needs are. Discovery reveals crucial user motivations (their pains, gains, or jobs-to-be-done). Based on that, the team can make better product decisions and create desirable and viable products.

2. Continuous discovery gives you a wider perspective, so you can see more possible solutions

You never know where continuous discovery can take you because your understanding of a product might be different from what users actually need. This is why you can expect continuous discovery to uncover completely unknown areas for the product, leading the product team along paths they would never consider without it. That unpredictability can stimulate creativity and strengthen an experimental mindset. It creates opportunities that you wouldn’t even think of.

3. Continuous discovery helps you prioritize

Which feature or functionality of your product is the most important? Which one should you develop first? Prioritization is not easy in product development. But to save precious time for your product team, you can just let users tell you their problems, and start building solutions to them. Real data from users, their pains and expectations will give clarity to your prioritization. User feedback will also help you to align with stakeholders in prioritizing the product backlog.

4. Continuous discovery helps you keep up with new opportunities and trends

If product companies keep their eye on actual product analytics, user feedback and market research, they can discover new value streams and opportunities for their products. They never lag behind the competition or lose momentum. As we already mentioned, user needs are evolving non-stop. They change along with the world, the market, and life circumstances. But they also change in response to your product’s evolution. Continuous discovery is a proven method for staying up-to-date with what’s influencing your users and product at any given moment in time.

5. Continuous discovery gives you fast answers

Continuous discovery enables you to validate your assumptions quickly and check if your product development is going in the right direction. You can avoid wasting resources. It encourages constant observation of user behavior, and gives fast answers to your hypotheses. When any changes in user needs occur, you can take immediate action, pivot development plans, and prevent your team from building unnecessary functionalities.

This greatly improves development sustainability. When you talk to users on a regular basis, you know their levels of satisfaction, and that helps you to plan the next steps in development. You can also ask them anything in relation to your product, and you will get immediate feedback.

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How to implement continuous discovery?

Continuous discovery should be one of the first steps when ideating the product. Before you start building anything, you want to know if your app will address real customer needs. You want to make sure people will actually use it. Moreover, It’s much easier to apply continuous discovery into your product team’s culture when it’s done at an early stage - when the product vision and strategy are created. Later on, you need to include continuous discovery actions in the product roadmap and product backlog. This makes it possible to continuously verify assumptions, validate hypotheses and conduct user testing.

What might help a lot in implementing product discovery is creating discovery sprints. Daily and weekly scrum events help to track ongoing discovery processes. Some product teams decide to run separate sprints for product delivery and product discovery. Sprints are then conducted alternately - one delivery sprint, one discovery sprint. Other teams implement discovery into their regular product sprints by adding product backlog items (PBI) that are directly linked to product discovery aspects, such as designing user research. With this in place, the team can be sure that discovery is not simply an add-on to product delivery, but is integrated with it. Short sprint cycles make it possible to run quick product experiments and to apply necessary product adjustments from sprint to sprint.

Another method is to choose one team member, e.g. UX researcher, who will take responsibility for constant observation of users and the market situation. The final decision on how to apply continuous discovery into product development is up to the particular product team.

Marty Cagan from Silicon Valley Product Group points out the importance of running user tests and analyzing user discoveries frequently (not just after releasing new features). This is what he says:

(…) instead of testing everything in a phase at the end of a release cycle (even a 2-week release cycle) and finding all the problems at once, it is much better to run automated regression test suites continuously to find newly-introduced issues as soon as possible (which significantly reduces the possible sources of the issue and hence the time to correct).

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Teresa Torres recommends conducting user research on a weekly basis. User testing can be done with short A/B tests, questionnaires, focus groups, or any number of other ways. The most important is to do it regularly and to analyze gathered feedback.

Final remarks on continuous product discovery

Product discovery - as well as product delivery - requires continuity. In mature digital organizations, product teams understand that delivery and discovery are not two separate processes when building a product. At Boldare, we conduct continuous product delivery and continuous product discovery simultaneously. In other words, we merge the two. This really helps us to stay up-to-date with users’ needs and create products that people actually want and need.