The past years have seen a huge amount of growth for the product management function. Companies of all sizes are investing more into product development and product managers are becoming key stakeholders within their organizations. With this growth comes change and it doesn’t take much to see that the role of product managers is constantly evolving and changing. 

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One of the biggest changes we’re seeing is a shift of focus from product delivery to product discovery. 

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Over the past couple of decades, product delivery has been the priority for product-led companies, who have invested heavily into ensuring that solutions are delivered fast and well. Efficiency in delivery has been the name of the game, with teams investing in top talent, consultancy, agile processes and lean ways of working.

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But the days of product delivery being the top priority for product teams are numbered. Despite large investments into product delivery, companies are still struggling with products and features that don’t have the desired impact. There are all kinds of studies suggesting that many, if not most, products brought to market fail and every product team has experienced building things that didn’t deliver as much value as expected.

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In recent years, high performing product teams have come to the conclusion that products rarely fail because they’re badly built, but rather because they do not solve a real or important enough customer problem. Understanding, validating and prioritizing your customers’ problems is the most important thing you can do when deciding what to build next. A mediocre solution to a big customer problem will always have more impact than a great solution to an unimportant problem. The process of deeply understanding your customers’ problems so that you can build compelling solutions is known as product discovery, and that is quickly becoming a priority for top product teams.

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Product discovery is all about 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.  

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A key feature of product discovery is that a lot of validation and prioritization efforts happen at the opportunity-level before focusing on solutions. This can be difficult for teams that are used to ‘solutioning’, which is the natural tendency people have of jumping straight to solutions before figuring out which problems are most worth solving. Given how tangibile solutions are and the fact that companies have made huge investments into product delivery, moving from a solutions-focus to an opportunity-focus can be challenging, but it is the best way to minimize the risk and maximize the impact of your product decisions. 

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If you’re keen to get started with product discovery, you can try Reveall – a product discovery platform that enables teams to easily define, validate and prioritize their biggest opportunities and align around the most effective solutions. 

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Reveall - Product Discovery Platform (Explainer)

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Say goodbye to confirmation bias, never-ending backlogs and useless roadmaps. Reveall helps ensure that your best ideas actually solve your customer’s problems and helps drive your outcomes.

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Go to reveall.co and start a free trial, Members of The Product Folks community can get up to 70% off!

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