Lessons from the Product discovery meetup

We at The Product Folks entering 2020 have planned to have a series of events on the Product Lifecycle. To start we had a session on Product discovery.

We had two awesome Speakers from PayPal
1. Vidhyalakshmi Balasubramanian Sr. Manager PayPal  
2. Saravana Gupta Sr. Manager PayPal
Thank you Jagdis for referring Vidya, she was amazing.

Lessons:At times products fail, I personally use 11 Google apps on a daily basis and I really like Google's products but still, Google has a history of launching failed products, eg: the Google glass.

Check out http://killedbygoogle.com/ Few reasons why it failed

  1. At that time it was priced $1500.
  2. There were health & safety concerns.

Now, can Google glass hit the market again?Of course Yes, if and only if Google discovers the needs of the customers just like what Snap did with Spectacles. Here Product discovery comes into the picture.Just like how Product development has a lifecycle Product discovery also has a lifecycle.

Foundational research: This phase is the research that goes behind driving the organizational goals. Typically in large companies, the Director or a Product leader will set the vision. In startups, of course, the CEO will drive the vision of the Product.

Problem discovery is where all the problems are identified. Problem distillation is grouping problems that Co-relate. Eg: One of the problems that I face is everyday travel to the office from my house takes one hour. Now, if another person says there's a lot of traffic at 9 am it is a different problem but we can correlate them into traffic problems. Both these problems can be co-related, distilled and then we can go about picking the right solution.

This is a Customer Problem statement template.During the event, we were split into two teams and we were given a small activity of putting Product discovery into practice.

User Persona: Age group 30-40, typical IT person.


Problem Distillation

The process is once problems are discovered then distill them and then prioritize that is how problems are uncovered.

Global Distillation

In the above picture, we see that certain countries' customers don't face certain problems in this way we can prioritize what to build.

Then comes solution discovery. That is for another day.

As a part of my New Year resolution I wanted to start writing online after some time I realized what is the best way to start if not to summarize my events. This is just the beginning lots in store.

Latest Posts

Come For the Content
Stay For the Community