Discovery

Discovery: understand your customer

Before building the right solution, it’s essential to understand what your customers truly need. Discovery is the process of identifying your customers' pain points and aligning them with the larger market. This stage is crucial to ensure that your product solves real problems and delivers meaningful value.

Why discovery matters

Once you've identified the business outcome you want to achieve, discovery helps you understand how to get there by asking key questions about your users:

• What do customers want us to build, and why?
• Are users interacting with the product in expected ways? If not, why?
• Why do they need this feature?
• Is our solution the best way to solve the problem?

Key focus areas

What do customers want us to build, and why?

• Feedback collection
  Do you have a system for gathering ongoing user feedback? Ensuring customers can submit feature requests anytime helps you stay in tune with their needs.
• Customer service workflow
  Is your customer support team equipped to share common requests and issues? This feedback loop is vital for staying aligned with user needs.
• User interviews
  Conduct user groups or interviews to dig deeper into customer expectations. What are the driving factors behind their feature requests?
• Business outcome focus
  Ensure your efforts are aligned with current business objectives. Are you prioritizing the right goals for your product roadmap?

Are users behaving as expected in the product?

• Usage data
  Do you have a system to track and analyze usage data? Understanding user behavior helps pinpoint friction points in the user journey.
• User flow analysis
  Are users following the steps you’ve envisioned? If not, where do they fall off, and what is causing the disruption?
• Friction points
  Identifying where users encounter difficulties can reveal why they aren’t fully engaging with certain features or workflows.

Where do users drop off?

• Segment patterns
  Are there common themes where specific user groups (based on roles, titles, or permissions) struggle? For example, are admins facing challenges that other user types don’t?
• Behavior patterns
  Analyzing these patterns helps you understand where improvements can be made, offering a tailored experience for each user segment.

What do power users do differently?

• Analyzing power users
  Look at the behavior of your most engaged users. What do they do differently? This data can help you replicate success across your broader user base.
• Optimize for success
  Can you solve the problem differently to make the experience better for a larger segment of users by learning from your power users’ actions?

The discovery process

To make the discovery phase effective, we conduct structured sessions with your team and gather real-time data from your product:

• Key stakeholder input:
  We spend 3 hours in key meetings with stakeholders to intake information, review findings, and make decisions.
• Functional meetings:
  All meetings are recorded to capture insights and ensure no valuable information is missed.

Why invest in discovery?

Discovery helps you avoid costly mistakes by ensuring that every feature and improvement is directly tied to solving user problems and achieving business goals. It’s a proactive step that maximizes your product’s impact.

Ready to better understand your customer?
Contact us to begin your discovery process and start building with confidence.

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