DISCOVERY

from Hypothesis to Synthesis

In this guide we will introduce some product development processes, tools and methodologies. These can help you take your initial hypothesis and transform it into the synthesis of opportunities and solutions discovered for your product! While you may have done a great deal of research to validate your key assumptions, your learning has just begun as you now orbit into the world of product discovery.

The MAP

You likely have heard the term Minimally Viable Product (MVP) before. Eric Reis coined MVP with his Lean Startup movement in the late 2000s. This movement ultimately laid the foundation of the build, measure, learn framework. This framework is a foundation for agile customer and product development. The ultimate goal of a MVP is to collect feedback so that you can test if your initial hypothesis creates enough value to to be viable. “Minimally Viable” is the key to Eric Reis’ epiphany. Building anything beyond the minimum, and you risk spending too much time and money. Rather, your goal is to understand if you are onto viability as soon as possible with the least amount of resources spent.

So how minimal should your product be? The minimal factor will depend on the competition or alternatives that exist for your idea. The expectations of a viable product have evolved since the idea of a MVP was introduced by Eric Reis in the early age of the internet. As software has proliferated and eaten up most industries, the bar for the modern MVP has been raised. Carlos Benyeto coined this evolution as the Minimally Awesome Product (MAP), and argues that the viability of an MVP is not defined by demonstrating the least amount of features available to satisfy users, but rather does not cross the threshold of viability until it can be sold. Therefore, the more alternatives available, the bar for user experience and rich features will need to be raised in order to truly validate your MVP. Your MVP will most likely require a parody of features represented by alternatives already available to the market in addition to your innovations. In this guide, we will take a deeper look into a powerful product development methodology that can help you discover how to discover innovation opportunities that lead to a Minimally Awesome Product.

Human Centered Design

Human (or User) centered design has become a popular approach to product and customer development. It uses an empathic approach to understanding another person's perspective, experiences, or emotions. By doing so, it encourages empathy and understanding by walking a mile in the shoes of your target audience. In this guide we will introduce a user centered approach to collect and synthesize qualitative feedback, which can be leveraged to build an awesome product. 

Ethnographic Research

Ethnographic research is the observation of people in their environment via face to face interviews. While this practice requires discipline, time and coordination, it can lead to incredible observations you may not have been realized otherwise. It is a high touch format for feedback collection, as it allows you a double click into the Why?. This is opposed to a lower touch format used to capture qualitative feedback such as a survey.

Ethnographic research is a Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO) tool, as the quality of feedback received will only be as good as the questions asked. Thus, it is essential to follow best practices for removing any confirmation bias from your questions. It is a best practice to prepare a narrative guide ahead of time that has open ended questions, which do not lead the person you are interviewing. You want to walk a day in their shoes by asking anecdotal questions such as “What does a typical day look like for you?” and then ask “Why?” when observations of frustration or pain come up.

Coordinating, preparing and practicing ethnographic research effectively requires a lot of effort and time. If you have a background in performing research this will come to you more naturally. Finding people to interview is also a challenge. You can tap into existing communities or online groups (e.g. Facebook Groups) related to your target audience to get people to respond and sign up. Make the calls short and advertise that you only need 15 minutes of their time to share their experiences and feedback. Additionally, if you have an existing community or user base, you can offer some kind of monetary reward to incentivize people to give you their time. Another tip to get more people to respond is to let those responding know that their feedback will ultimately help you shape the future experience you are looking to build. 

Include a Calendly link to streamline the scheduling of interviews. There are some other product tools that can help you streamline the recording and organization of feedback. Tetra Insights is an automated user research engine that allows you to upload your videos, tag any insights or patterns, and then create highlight reels which can be shared with other stakeholders to back up any synthesis for future product direction. You don’t want to perform user research just to check off the box, or further validate your own confirmation bias. Rather the key is to distill unbiased powerful insights and patterns that lead to confidence in your product design.

Proto-Personas

You will want to include personal questions to ask research participants during each interview. This will help inform your persona research. Building a product around personas is a best practice, as it allows you to clearly articulate how the needs, wants and expectations of different audiences are represented in your product. Proto-personas are fictional archetypes that you can use to represent your target market. In order to develop a proto-persona, you will need to do the following:

• Ask demographic questions to understand their age, gender, and eduction.

• Ask professional questions to understand their work experience.

• Ask behavioral questions which relate to their personalities, habits, desires, and routines.

• Give your proto-personas a fictional name and picture. This will then help you visualize each persona you are building your product for.

Once you have developed proto-personas, you can now start to map out the end to end journey they navigate while interacting with what exists today. This will help you to determine the potential opportunities and solutions (value) your product can disrupt or provide. 

User Journey Maps

With insightful qualitative feedback and proto-personas crafted from user centered research, it is time to map the journey for each of our personas. This is done by organizing all the essential steps they may take as they interact with the status-quo of existing offerings and alternatives you are hoping to disrupt or improve. A user journey map is typically broken into different phases or affinities. These phases are subjective, but should logically summarize each major step the user transitions through during their journey. Now you can frame the different aspects of the user journey, to understand where there may be opportunities in which to innovate.

Synthesis

Synthesis is discovering the patterns and themes in the qualitative feedback you have collected. It is the eureka part of the user centered design methodology. You are more likely to discover patterns and themes when you have invested quality effort and time into doing your research. If your research is broken into different teams or personas, you will need to collaborate to validate any discovered themes and patterns. This will ultimately become your product blueprint for your MVP, as the validated themes from your qualitative research synthesis will ultimately become features you can design into your product.

Usability Testing

There is more prototyping and testing to be done before developing, coding, or crafting your MVP. Rather than going right to development which is too expensive to get wrong (why most startups run out of gas), Hi Fidelity (HiFi) designs can give you and your team confidence that your product idea will lead to the desired impact and elation when you do ultimately develop it. While you do not need to be a designer to build a prototype, having someone on your team who has graphic design experience will be tremendously valuable in helping you create a design system and HiFi prototype. This HiFi prototype will serve as a crucial artifact for usability testing.

Leveraging the same format and process in your quantitative research calls where you setup in person or on a call interviews, a usability test with a HiFi design will allow you observe an end user’s behavior and identify where users are getting hung up. In your calls, ask clarifying questions to capture what emotions they are going through while they interact with your prototype or interface design. Your usability tests should incorporate any discovered patterns for preferences. Repeat the process and improve upon your prototype being used as an aid in your research feedback. 

So how many usability tests with a HiFi design prototype should you do to collect the necessary feedback to feel confident in your product’s design before moving to development? This will depend on the quality of feedback you are receiving and how much research/feedback is pertinent for your specific goals. Some teams may need only a handful of tests. The goal is to get to a place where you are starting to hear more or less the same pattern of feedback (use the 80/20 rule). Only then is time to sign off on the design and move to the development of your MVP.

Case in Point

In 2020, I began working on Pastimes, a social app that helped people find interested in doing the same activities. As an avid outdoor enthusiast, I felt that there had to be a better solution to meeting new outdoor friends than what existed: MeetUp and Facebook Groups. While I was aware of Human Centered Design principals, I ignored much of such given the lack of resources. I thought the Human Centered Design methodology should be reserved for more mature product design when resources could be afforded.

Thus, I began blazing forward with design ideas without putting in the product and customer development work. A few months later, the first MVP of our app was released. While we had thousands of users download the app, hardly anyone was creating an event on the app for others to discover their plans. I had my icarus moment of flying too close to the sun. It was time to start talking to users and understand why they were not creating events and making plans despite downloading the app, creating an account and checking out the app. I started working with a talented product designer who brought many of the aforementioned human centered design systems, tools and practices to the team.

We began collecting qualitative feedback using ethnographic research calls via Zoom. We built a proto-persona named Adventurous Alex. We mapped out a user journey for Adventurous Alex. This included 5 major phases. Discovering others around them, Connecting with others, Making and organizing plans, Doing stuff with others IRL, and Evaluating whether to do stuff with others again. Within each of these steps, we synthesized ways we could make Adventurous Alex’s journey better based on the patterns recognized after doing tons of research calls. Furthermore, it was now clear why users were not creating events on the app. It was a chicken or egg problem. How could our users make plans if you don’t have tooling and an experience for the previous essential steps of the user journey (discovering and connecting)?

Thus, our app’s Hifi prototype designs ultimately took shape in the form of Adventurous Alex’s journey. The home screen was focused on helping Alex discover everyone interested in the same activities within a range of Alex’s preferred location radius. Messaging tooling allowed users to connect and make plans. Event tools helped users organize plans once they were made. Next, we started iterating our hifi prototype designs based on usability tests performed with users. The feedback we received gave us all more confidence that we would see a much different result in our next release.

When we released Pastimes 2.0, we did in fact see our users connecting and making plans. We went from crickets to 15K active users connecting each month. This was the proof in the pudding that I needed. I learned to trust in the process. While Human Centered Design is a lot of work, it does indeed work. No matter the stage, it is important to build products that your users need, not what you think they need. You therefore need to step out of your shoes and walk in their shoes to discover their journey in order do such.

MVP Development

The output of the Discovery phase is a prototype of your MVP’s design requirements. If you are a software developer and have led the qualitative research, you should be motivated and excited for all the potential your actual product will have on your users/customers once it is released into the world. If you are not a software developer, you will need to share your HiFi prototype for your MVP with your developer(s) and evangelize how and why you have derived confidence in your design based on the synthesis of human centered qualitative research and usability tests.

Build vs Buy MVP

What if you or anyone else on your team is not a software developer? You may be tempted to pay a team of off shore developers to build your MVP. If you are to outsource software development, it is critical to have good communication, trust and confidence in the team you work with. Only buy or outsource your development when you have deep pockets or are not able to find a co-founder aligned to your mission and motivated via equity incentives. This may ultimately mean delaying your product development and spending more time finding a technical co-founder who has the complementary skills of software development. Most teams do not have the capital to afford hiring a software developer even part time, let alone paying for outsourced development when building their initial MVP. If you are going to outsource your code to a consultant or off shore team, it is even more important that you have discovered the right product via the aforementioned process, tools and methodologies. You should have confidence in any HiFi designs derived based on what you discovered in your qualitative research and usability tests. Once you have released your MVP, and your outcome of traction validates your hypothesis, you will be in a better position to raise capital to either hire developers or outsource development.

Sprint Planning

Typically developers and product managers come together each week to prioritize and plan a defined “sprint” of work to be done. This should be a collaborative process where developers buy-in and agree to the scope of User Stories they can realistically get across the finish line in the agreed upon time of the sprint timeline. When looking at the MVP' HiFi design requirements, how does one prioritize what to build first? Each User Story or feature should be prioritized based on a logical sequence of impact and complexity. Some User Stories will have a logical sequence of priority based on dependencies and feature parody. Once the initial scaffolding of dependencies and parody of fundamental features are developed, the art of product management will begin. Each week, you will need to work with your team to prioritize the next set of User Stories into development sprints. Deciding what comes next is always going to be a tradeoff for something else not getting developed. Thus, it is important to ensure each User Story that gets selected into the current sprint moves the needle in terms of outcome for the end user.

Stand-ups

Management of sprints should be done via a daily or weekly standup meeting. These are short meetings where developers go through any blockers they are running into while coding any of the User Stories. Stand-ups allow you to make trade-offs based on realized compromises and complexities that were not previously apparent in the planning process. It is possible some of the features that you are running into complexities with may not even be used or discovered once it is released. Thus, it is best to error on the side of getting the least done to be able to release, measure and learn. It will be your job to navigate these trade-offs and assess the depth and breath required for your MVP based on the needs and wants you have discovered about your users.

Discovery Checklist

Discovery is an iterative process and is not a one stop shop in the startup journey. You will need to discover many aspects of your audience. In this guide we looked at some best practice processes, tools and methodologies that can help discover what to build in your product. In the next guide we will take a look at ways to bootstrap growth, which can lead to more discovery.

The following checklist can be used for discovering your MVP/MAP:

1. Find an existing community or affinity group related to your target audience.
   

2. Get people to sign up for 15-20 minutes of their time via in person or phone call.
   

3. Prepare a narrative interview guide that removes confirmation bias using ethnocentric research best practices.
   

4. Perform qualitative research calls.
   

5. Develop realistic proto-personas for different segments of your target audience.
   

6. Create a user journey map for each proto-persona.
   

7. Synthesis learned opportunities and potential innovations based on more qualitative research.
   

8. Design hi-fi prototypes for usability tests based on features and solutions for learned opportunities/innovations.
   

9. Plan and prioritize the User Stories for your MVP based on impact and complexity into weekly sprints.
   

10. Use daily or weekly stand-up meetings with your developers to manage sprints.