How to help your team navigate Product Discovery and work with executives
It’s often tough to speak up during Product Discovery. Here are three questions to help.
Product Discovery is an exciting part of any Design Project, and it may be a Designer’s first exposure to working with executives.
During a Project Kickoff, CEOs and other executives may come to discuss their grand vision of the project or help establish its overall goals. Unfortunately, as a result, many Designers stay silent and wait for other voices to speak up and finish talking.
However, that approach may cost you a lot of time and effort. Decisions you make during the Discovery process can often significantly impact the final product, and asking three specific questions during this process can help you do that.
But before we get into that, you must remember one thing: you’re braver than you think.
Designers are brave because they deal with ambiguity
Right now, it’s a tough time to be a Designer. Many may feel beaten between a horrible job market and a vague career ladder. However, even if you’re reflecting on your design career, you should recognize that you’re probably braver than you think.
Whether you’ve interviewed CEOs or VPs about a product, talked with users in less-than-ideal settings, or fought to complete design projects on short budgets and timelines, you have probably done things that most other jobs don’t deal with.
This is because Design, at its core, is all about clearing up ambiguity. Whether we need to talk with the people who wrote down requirements or with subject-matter experts who think even the most complex interface is easy, all of our work is meant to turn what may be a vague list of requirements into a visual interface.
These skills are crucial during Product Discovery when you might not even have a list of requirements: it may just be a vague idea in someone’s head.
Of course, you’re probably not going to lead these discussions. You aren’t the CEO, and you might not have subject expertise in the domain you’re designing in.
However, that’s not the purpose of Designers in Product Discovery. Instead, our job is to frame the problem correctly. Our role in these discovery sessions is to ask the right question, with the implicit promise that each question will affect the visual design.
By framing the problem and what you’re trying to solve in this way, you can help the product team adjust the scope, scale, and focus of the problem they focus on.
Here’s how to do that.
The three questions to uncover during Product Discovery
According to The Design Method: A Philosophy and Process for Functional Visual Communication, there are three main questions that you must address in the Discovery process.
Here’s why each of these matters.
Why is this important?
One of the most critical questions to be aware of is understanding why something matters from both business and user perspectives.
Often, this starts by talking with the business and stakeholders to understand one specific question: “Why is this important to the business?”
If you’re asked to design a particular feature, what’s the particular business need? Why work on this as part of our business strategy? This is one of the easiest ways designers can get involved on the business side, as the answers often are a designer’s first exposure to Business Strategy.
Whether this feature is to have feature parity with our competitors, to try and curb the number of people canceling subscriptions, or more, understanding that, from the business perspective, can inform our overall view.
We can then combine this with the question we typically uncover in user research: Why does this matter to our users? By understanding why the business wants this created, along with user motivations, we have a clear idea of the overall purpose of the product or feature.
Answering this question also helps us address the scope of the product. At this stage, whether it’s a single redesigned page or an entire workflow, you should be able to clarify the ask from a design perspective.
Understanding these two perspectives helps you understand the overall why, which is crucial for designing better products and discussing this project later in your design portfolio.
What don’t I know?
The next important question you must ask is, “What don’t I know?”
If we hadn’t conducted user research at the time, the answer may be, “I don’t know why (or even if) users will want to use this feature.” After all, without adequately understanding user motivations, it doesn’t make sense to spend time and resources building this feature.
Another likely knowledge gap may be around subject matter expertise: perhaps you know nothing about a particular topic and need to learn from technical people.
Creating a list of “To-do” tasks centered around gaps in knowledge is a great way to establish the next steps in designing the project and identifying the problem.
This and the next question should give you all you need to start.
Who can I talk to about this?
You’re often not as alone as you think, wandering within ambiguity, but until you define exactly what you’re looking for, it’s tough to get help.
Rather than asking your Manager, “I don’t know anything about this. Is there someone I can talk to?”, defining precisely what you’re looking for can help them connect you with people who can answer a specific question.
For example, “I don’t know why we’re asked to do configuration at this point. From a user perspective, it’s a whole lot of extra work without a lot of payoff. Is there someone I can talk to to understand the technical purpose of configuration?”
Doing this can help you during the discovery process.
Fixing issues in Product Discovery saves a lot of effort in the future
When we talk about the value of design, we often talk about how fixing problems in the Design stage saves a lot of time and effort compared to fixing them during development.
Product Discovery is the same way. Clarifying ambiguity and helping frame the problem during this stage can often help save a whole bunch of back-and-forth meetings later, where people discover they had different interpretations of the problem
However, it may seem tricky to ‘interrupt’ Product Discovery when people much higher up in the organization are talking about their vision for the future.
That’s why these three questions can help. These questions help you (and your team) understand the problem, but they can help frame it to make it easier to create designs that solve your target problem.
So the next time you find yourself in a Project Kickoff meeting or Product Discovery, don’t just wait on the sidelines for other people to finish talking. You can contribute a whole lot more than you realize to the discussion.
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Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer and Creator of the Data and Design newsletter. His book, Data-Informed UX Design, provides 21 small changes you can make to your design process to leverage the power of data and design.