If you've been building products for a while, you've probably already lived the two inconvenient truths. First, almost half of the big ideas that end up on your roadmap may bring no value to the customer or the business. Second, even the ones that prove valuable — viable, valuable, feasible, usable — need multiple iterations to get right. And that matters even more now, when companies are fighting to reduce costs and be profitable. So sorting the ideas with potential from the ones without, and iterating fast on the promising ones, is the whole game.

Why half of those ideas miss

An idea can fail on any of four risks. Value isn't there — customers aren't excited and wouldn't use it. Usability isn't there — they'd try it but can't figure out how. Feasibility — it's harder and costlier to build than expected and doesn't make business sense right now. Or business viability — a legal, financial, or other constraint blocks it. The question is how you deal with these risks up front instead of after you've built and launched. As Marty Cagan argues in Inspired, if you can prototype and test ideas with users, engineers, and business stakeholders in hours and days rather than weeks and months, it changes the dynamics and the results. That's what we help clients do — prototype and test in days or weeks instead of building for months.

What product discovery actually is

Product discovery is the continuous process of closely understanding your customers' problems and needs, then validating your solution ideas before development starts. It helps you decide what to build, learn fast, and tackle risk up front. It's worth doing when you're launching something new, upgrading an existing product, or going through major business change — and it should be continuous, not a one-off. The Double Diamond captures it well: a problem space (understanding and defining the problem) and a solution space (ideas, prototypes, tests). Ideas flow from your strategic vision into a backlog, get tested with users, and either go to the bin or to the delivery team — and once shipped, users generate new requests that flow back into discovery. As Cagan puts it, qualitative testing of your product ideas with real users is probably the single most important discovery activity for you and your team.

What it looks like in practice

A few years ago we worked with an edtech company — COVID era, when schools moved online overnight and it became critical to make these products work for everyone. At that stage they served 650 schools and around 100,000 users in Romania. The goal was to streamline onboarding, but in essence to redesign the whole product. We split it into three parts: research and strategy (mapping the business, competitors, positioning, personas, and the customer journey to find the biggest pain — onboarding for teachers); a design sprint (aligning the team, researching how others solve similar challenges, then prototyping and testing with teachers); and design (iterating on the feedback and building the design system and dev-ready assets). In three to four weeks the team had a clear understanding of their product's context, a validated new design direction, a tested onboarding flow for teachers, and all the assets for development.

If improving your product is a top priority, send us a message — discovery is exactly where we start.