Teams can build a product or feature exactly to specification and still fail if customers don’t respond positively to the product. In their haste to deliver (maybe someone told them what was the right thing to do) the teams don’t have the necessary information to understand what their customers and users want nor why, so they build.. something. When a problem is poorly understood, the expectations of internal and external stakeholders including customers are generally mismanaged and hard to overcome.
This is an opportunity for improved Product Discovery and Validation (D&V). In fact, today, Scrum.org introduced our new course on the topic! (More details below.)
The main objective of product discovery is to understand customer needs, challenges, and desires before building a solution, so you don’t end up with just.. something. Discovery encourages a team to identify customer satisfaction gaps (customer needs that aren’t currently being met) - and consider ideas to meet them, while the validation step requires the teams to run experiments and gather data and information that validates or invalidates their ideas and solutions.
D&V isn’t a new concept. It’s part of smart product management. However, it’s inherently messy and should be an ongoing process. In complex product development, where an empirical mindset is crucial, continuous discovery allows teams to understand their customers and adapt to their evolving needs. It requires experimentation, enabling teams to learn quickly about their assumptions. This reduces risk and increases the chances of delivering real value.
Here are some additional questions for you to explore:
What do you know about your customers? Do you have enough information to understand their problems? Knowing your customers and their satisfaction gaps informs the problems that they face and the outcomes that they potentially want that you can help solve through your product. As you gather insights, you may learn that you have different types of customers who have common satisfaction gaps and desire the same outcome. This is another reason why exploring problems before solutions is helpful.
What challenges might you face from teams and internal stakeholders about experimentation? Validation requires testing an assumption that is confirmed to be true or false by data. This data can refute ideas and initiatives that people are emotionally attached to. There may be politics at play that you are not aware of and also biases that exist. Lead with transparency and empathy.
What is the organization’s appetite for risk? In product management and development, understanding your organization’s risk appetite to address a problem for a customer may inform the types of ideas a team tests and the experiments they run. It’s important to gauge acceptable risk boundaries, actions and potential results. Another way to think about this is, what is the organization willing to do to satisfy this customer problem or meet this goal? Gauge this periodically as this level will change.
Ultimately, product discovery and validation helps organizations sustain by being relevant to customer needs. I hope my previous thoughts help you facilitate conversations with your teams about how you're delivering value to customers - and how you can embrace discovery and validation in your product development.
More Resources
For those wanting hands-on classroom training, I suggest exploring the Scrum.org Professional Product Discovery and Validation training course. This is a one-day course, launched today, that dives into experimentation. Students go through a case study using discovery to validate ideas and negotiate stakeholder conversations.
For Scrum Teams, Dave West recently published 2 blogs on the topic. “Product Discovery and Validation in Scrum,” which explores how discovery enables Scrum Teams to build the “right” thing. “Dispelling Myths of Product Discovery in Scrum” provides common myths you might have or hear - and ways to reconsider them.
To learn more about a real-case scenario application of discovery and validation, in this Scrum.org Community podcast episode, Paul Kujiten and Lavaneesh Gautam discuss their relationship as Developer and stakeholder and how techniques from the PPDV course were used to create the course.