Reverse-Discovery: The Best Way to Get Started With Product Discovery

In recent years, product discovery has become a growing priority for high-performing product teams.

Product discovery is the process of deeply understanding your customers’ problems so that you can build compelling solutions for them.

Product discovery has gained importance in the product world as teams become increasingly weary of the risks of ‘solutioning’, i.e., the natural tendency of people to jump straight to solutions before understanding which customer problems they need to solve.

Understanding, validating, and prioritizing your customers’ problems (also referred to as ‘opportunities’ in product discovery circles) is the most important thing you can do when deciding what to build next.

As we find ourselves in unpredictable times where many products and features risk failing, teams realize that they have little margin for error; if they decide to build something, it needs to be something that has a real impact.

Making product discovery well is a great way to minimize the risk of building something that doesn’t have the desired impact.

The process of defining your key outcomes (e.g., your ‘OKRs’), understanding which opportunities (e.g., customer problems) can most help drive those outcomes, and then figuring out which solutions (e.g., products, features) can have the biggest impact on the opportunities, is a tried and tested way to deliver value to your customers consistently.

But the looming question is always: how do you get started with product discovery properly?

As mentioned before, focusing on solutions is a natural thing.

Solutions are tangible, and companies have spent decades investing heavily in product delivery.

Shifting from a solutions-focus to an opportunities-focus isn’t easy, especially given that people who don’t like finding out solutions on their roadmap might not be as impactful as they’d hoped. That said, delivering features that don’t get used is much worse.

For teams that speak to their customers regularly and have already spent time fleshing out and validating solutions, it might seem wasteful to start from scratch. That is where ‘reverse-discovery’ can come in handy.

Reverse-Discovery is a process developed by Marcel Hagedoorn, the CPO of the product discovery platform Reveall, designed to help teams ‘implement’ product discovery into their existing process.

The idea behind reverse-discovery is to start with solutions you have already defined and reverse-engineer the discovery process from there – essentially working backward from solutions to ensure they solve essential customer problems and can impact your teams’ outcomes.

Reverse-discovery is a great way to incorporate the discovery process into your existing workflows. It allows you to think in terms of problems and opportunities without having to compromise the work you already did previously.

Most importantly, it is a great way to shine a scrutinous light on your roadmap and show stakeholders how important it is to ensure your solutions solve significant customer problems.

At Reveall, we are so convinced by the reverse-discovery approach that we’ve built it into our platforms’ onboarding, allowing teams to add solutions and link them back to opportunities and outcomes.

If you want to do more with product discovery, try applying the reverse-discovery approach to your current solutions and see where it takes you.

Featured image generated via HackerNoon AI prompt of “a pixelated man learning about a desktop computer by breaking it apart into pieces and examining it with a magnifying glass.”