The product discovery process: Steps, tools, and benefits
Last updated: October 2024
Product discovery is about deeply understanding customer needs so you can build products people love. It involves identifying a worthwhile problem, determining the best solution, and adapting to changing customer and business needs.
Historically, companies invested in discovery before launching new products or adding major functionality. But today, discovery is increasingly seen as a continuous process that happens throughout the product lifecycle. Product builders and entrepreneurs lead these discovery efforts — this helps guide the team to consistently deliver incremental value to customers.
Define a strong product discovery process using Aha! Roadmaps — with a free trial.
This guide covers everything you need to know to improve your process from a product builder's perspective. Keep on reading or use the following links to jump ahead to a specific section:
What is product discovery?
Product discovery is the first step toward building valuable products. It is where teams research, test, and refine ideas, and it is also about ensuring every feature aligns with real customer needs. Effective discovery guides product decisions — helping teams stay focused on solutions that deliver meaningful impact.
Product discovery is some of the most dynamic work in product development. Doing it well requires skill, commitment, and a drive to build the best offering possible. It can also be incredibly challenging to do well. Here are a few reasons why:
It is unclear who to involve.
Coordinating conversations is manual and time-consuming.
There is limited research experience across the team.
It is uncomfortable to ask open questions or receive hard feedback.
It is hard to recognize patterns and derive insights.
And it is even harder to connect insights to product decisions.
Why is product discovery important?
Product discovery requires deep empathy for customers and a genuine grasp of their struggles. Successful product builders go beyond a surface understanding of who their users are — they internalize their problems and anticipate those users' needs as their own.
If you are passionate about building a lovable product‚ you must also be passionate about knowing and loving the customer.
Brian de HaaffAha! co-founder and CEO
A strong discovery process adds clarity and structure to product development. It helps you move past initial assumptions, validate customer problems with data, and ensure solutions provide real value. This holistic understanding of customer needs (whether you call it "product discovery" or something else) is vital for maximizing the impact of your product work.
Product discovery helps teams:
Empathize: Adopt a customer-centric mindset toward product development
Innovate: Generate new ideas for more lovable products
Prioritize: Focus on features that create the most customer happiness
Reduce risk: Make sure the product delivers value, is easy to use, is realistic to build, and aligns with business goals
By investing in product discovery, your team lays the foundation for building products that truly resonate with customers, driving long-term success throughout the entire product lifecycle.
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Continuous product discovery vs. the old way
Product discovery has come a long way. What used to be a discrete, periodic task is now an "always on" element of your work. After all, it is what helps you keep pace with today's changing customer needs.
Product decisions were often top-down and based on formal, project-driven research in the past. Data and insights were also scattered, leaving teams without a cohesive view of the customer landscape. For example, a product team that relied solely on an annual customer survey to set feature priorities likely found that some features felt outdated by launch time.
Today, continuous discovery is collaborative and driven by real-time insights. It is:
Ongoing: Discovery happens all the time, allowing teams to pivot based on new data.
Inclusive: Team members from all functions contribute, enabling richer perspectives and faster iteration.
Real-time: It combines formal research with informal iterative feedback loops, keeping teams tuned into immediate insights.
Centralized: information is stored in a single spot that is accessible to everyone.
Transparent: Decisions are open, data-driven, and aligned with customer priorities, which minimizes guesswork.
Continuous discovery keeps you connected to what matters most: your customers. By making discovery a core ongoing practice, product teams can align more closely with users and deliver solutions with confidence.
What does the product discovery process entail?
Some companies use a structured product discovery framework, whereas others prefer a more flexible approach. You might try different techniques to spark ideas, gather relevant data, or build empathy for your future users.
The stages of product discovery vary across organizations. But generally, this process involves understanding customer needs and validating that understanding. Note that these phases are not necessarily linear. After evaluating an idea, you might realize assumptions were off and return to the research and ideate stages to refine.
Here is an overview of what the process might look like:
Close collaboration between product management, product marketing, designers, and developers is essential to create a product that truly resonates with customers. Everyone in the organization has valuable insights to share about customer needs, product performance, and areas for improvement — including customers themselves. By speaking directly with customers and asking thoughtful questions, you move beyond surface-level personas to deeply understand and internalize their struggles.
So what does product discovery look like in action? Let's move beyond the theory and dig into a real-world example. Here is a look at how the Aha! product team approaches product discovery day to day:
Phase | Our recommended approach |
Research |
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Ideate |
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Evaluate |
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Prioritize |
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Prototype |
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Test |
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AI has become a transformative part of product discovery, especially when researching and analyzing user feedback. With the Aha! Ideas AI assistant, you can explore feedback at scale, uncover high-level themes, and surface related ideas. You can even run AI analyses on specific features to summarize the top use cases and validate ideas.
This streamlined approach makes it easier than ever to refine your roadmap with updated data and prioritize features that customers truly want. More on these capabilities next.
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Which tools support product discovery?
At Aha! we rely on Aha! Ideas, integrated with our broader product development suite, to support continuous product discovery. An idea management platform, Aha! Ideas enables us to collect feedback, prioritize insights, and keep our discovery work aligned with development.
Here is how we use specific features within Aha! Ideas to support several phases of discovery.
Phase | Functionality |
Research | Use an ideas portal to collect insights directly from customers, colleagues, and partners.
In Aha! Ideas, you can create as many portals as you need, customize them to match your brand, and even translate them into your users' preferred languages. |
Ideate | Bring customer feedback and whiteboarding together — so you can ideate on concepts and map out potential solutions.
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Evaluate | Use research tools to better understand your customers and discover exactly what they need from your product.
Our AI exploration functionality can also help:
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Prioritize | Quantify the value of each idea by scoring it against factors such as popularity, effort, and impact.
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Once you finalize high-priority ideas, convert them directly into initiatives, epics, features, and requirements in Aha! Roadmaps. This creates a link so you can track progress through to delivery and tie all of your discovery work directly to your product roadmap.
Related:
Establishing a robust product discovery process is vital for building lovable products. When you are able to zoom in on exactly what people need and how you will deliver it, you can begin bringing greater value to customers and the business.
FAQs about the product discovery process
How do you keep all product discovery research organized?
Keeping research organized is crucial for effective product discovery. We recommend using Aha! Knowledge to create an internal knowledge base. You can document customer insights, key findings, and learnings from each discovery phase in one central place, making it easy for the whole team to access and build on past research.
Who should be involved in product discovery?
Typically, product managers and entrepreneurs lead product discovery, but it works best with cross-functional involvement. Key players also include designers, engineers, and customer-facing teams that bring valuable insights from different perspectives. Involving stakeholders early ensures alignment and a well-rounded understanding of customer needs.
What tools are commonly used in product discovery?
Product discovery tools help with gathering feedback, ideation, prioritization, and documentation. Aha! Ideas is perfect for collecting and analyzing customer feedback, whereas Aha! Knowledge helps in documenting insights. Many teams also use whiteboarding and research tools to brainstorm and validate ideas.
