Lean Product Discovery

10th June 2025 10/06/25
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Lean Product Discovery: How to Build What Customers Actually Want

Introduction

Building great products is a challenging endeavour. Empirical data consistently confirm that a high percentage of new products ultimately fail. For every exemplary case such as Apple, Google, or Facebook, there exist countless failed products that have forced companies to cease operations. Those who have experienced the development of a product that resonates deeply with customers are well aware of the profound impact that such success can have. When users express genuine enthusiasm and satisfaction, business metrics tend to grow rapidly and significantly. However, despite these exceptional outcomes, only a very small fraction of products achieves this level of success. Relying on mere conjecture to determine customer preferences can lead either to serendipitous success or to significant failure. This raises important questions: What makes it so difficult to build products that customers truly love, and why do so many products fail?

The Necessity of Discovery

Successful products are not the result of arbitrary decisions or guesswork; rather, they emerge from a deliberate and systematic process of discovery. Prior to attaining commercial success, a product must undergo a phase of rigorous discovery. Product discovery is an iterative and adaptable process dedicated to understanding the needs of customers and the dynamics of the marketplace, and then employing that knowledge to guide product development. For founders and product managers, it is absolutely essential to master this process as the product moves from its conceptual stage to market launch.

Product discovery is fundamentally the process of determining what to build. It involves ensuring that all items in the product backlog have been validated in advance and that this validation is integral to routine operations. Importantly, product discovery is not a one-off event. It constitutes a continuous process that high-performance product teams integrate into their daily activities. At its core, product discovery is designed to progressively reduce uncertainty surrounding a product idea. Consequently, companies must transition away from a one-off, large-scale design approach and instead empower their product teams to continuously evolve the product in alignment with strategic business objectives.

Origins and Foundations

The term “Product Discovery” finds its origin in the work of two serial entrepreneurs, Steve Blank and Eric Ries. These individuals are widely recognized for their contributions to the Lean Startup methodology. Eric Ries is the author of The Lean Startup (2010), and Steve Blank authored “Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything” for the Harvard Business Review in 2013. At the core of the Lean Startup approach is the practice of engaging customers early in the business development process, and this early engagement is precisely the theoretical basis for Product Discovery.

Brant Cooper, the author of The Lean Entrepreneur, articulates the concept succinctly: Customer Discovery is fundamentally about questioning one’s core business assumptions. When executed effectively, Customer Discovery represents a customer-centric scientific process that substantiates an assumed product-market fit with empirical evidence.

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Begin with the end in mind

The process of product development always commences with a clearly defined goal or challenge and culminates in the decision to build a product or feature. Interposed between these two points is a dual-loop process of Exploration and Validation. Within this dual-loop, several critical decision points emerge, including:

Can the team proceed directly to development based on the defined goal?
Should further exploration of the problem space be undertaken?
Is immediate development justified after the initial exploration?
Is additional exploration required to refine the understanding of the problem?
Is customer validation necessary following exploration?
Can development commence following validation, or is further exploration indicated by new insights?
Is further validation required before proceeding?
Should the project be cancelled or should the strategy pivot?

This structured approach ensures that each stage of product development is both deliberate and evidence-based, thereby reducing uncertainty and enhancing the likelihood of achieving a robust product-market fit.

The Lean Product Process

The Lean Product Process, as depicted in Figure below, is a systematic framework that guides practitioners through the various layers of the product development pyramid, beginning with the foundational elements and progressing upward.

This process comprises six distinct steps:

Determine your target customers
Identify underserved customer needs
Define your value proposition
Specify your minimum viable product (MVP) feature set
Create your MVP prototype
Test your MVP with customers

It is important to emphasize that not all six steps are necessary for every product or feature. Certain steps are specifically applicable when one is developing a completely new product. For example, the tasks of determining target customers, identifying underserved needs, and defining the value proposition are foundational activities that may only require initial completion when launching a new product. However, once the version one product has been launched, continuous improvement and additional functionality can be achieved by iteratively revisiting the latter three steps—namely, specifying which features to pursue, creating those features, and testing them with customers.

Product Discovery versus Product Delivery

The process of creating successful products essentially involves two fundamental activities: determining what to build and executing the build itself. Product Discovery refers to the systematic process of identifying what should be built by progressively reducing uncertainty surrounding a business idea, ultimately leading to the validation of backlog items. In contrast, Product Delivery corresponds to the actual process of building the product.

Traditionally, organizations have predominantly concentrated their efforts on the building phase, often neglecting the discovery phase. The balance between these two processes varies depending on the product life cycle stage. For example, initiating a novel business idea differs considerably from targeting a new customer segment or executing a recurring marketing campaign, such as a Black Friday initiative.

At its core, Product Discovery is an evidence-based process designed to reduce uncertainty by uncovering problems that merit solutions and by validating the potential of proposed solutions. This process typically unfolds through a series of nonlinear activities performed by cross-functional teams. In essence, Product Discovery encompasses a flexible period during which the focus is on selecting and refining what to build—the right thing—rather than on optimizing the implementation, which is the focus during Product Delivery.

The structure and approach of Product Discovery can vary considerably and will be elucidated further in subsequent sections. Typically, product teams concentrate either on the problem space—striving to ascertain whether a genuine problem exists among users, customers, or stakeholders—or on the solution space, where they focus on devising and executing a matching solution. Although engaging both the problem and solution spaces is essential to adequately satisfy users and support business objectives, teams frequently misallocate their time and attention. Ideally, Product Discovery should primarily concentrate on the problem space.

While Product Discovery constitutes one of the critical pillars of successful product development, it must be integrated with an outcome-oriented approach to Product Strategy, Product Goals, and Product Roadmaps. The process begins with an understanding of the strategic context and the relevant Product Strategy patterns. The objective is not to formulate an overly elaborate, McKinsey-level company strategy but to develop a pragmatic framework for guiding trade-off decisions throughout the navigation of the problem space during the Discovery process.

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A few of the companies that have adopted the Lean Approach:

Company	Industry
Toyota	Automotive OEM
Teledyne Bathos	Instrumentation
Denso	Automotive Supplier
GE Appliance	Appliances
Sango Auto	Automotive Supplier
Fisher & Paykel	Appliances
Delphi	Automotive Supplier
Goodyear	Tire Manufacturing
Ford Motor Co.	Automotive OEM
Pratt & Whitney	Aircraft Engines / Aerospace
Honda Motor Co.	Automotive OEM
Harley-Davison	Motorcycle Manufacturing
Scania	Heavy Truck Manufacturing
Schilling Robotics	Underwater Robotics
Novo Nordisk	Medical Devices
Michigan Healthcare	Healthcare
Steelcase	Furniture
Rivian Electric	Electric Automobiles
Solar Turbine (CAT)	Turbine Engines
Caterpillar	Earthmoving Equipment

Lean Principles and Best Practices

A general definition of Lean Principles applicable to any Lean Enterprise includes ten guiding principles grouped into four dimensions.

Ten Best Practices for Creating Successful Products

Maintain a clear perspective while remaining receptive to new evidence: Make decisions confidently while remaining open to adapting based on emerging insights.
Explicitly formulate your hypotheses: Clearly define and document underlying assumptions to facilitate iterative refinement of product decisions.
Prioritize tasks decisively: Focus on the most important tasks to manage time and resources efficiently.
Maintain a limited yet focused scope: Work in small, manageable iterations to accelerate progress and minimize risk.
Continuously engage with customers: Regularly interact with users to understand their needs and ensure that the product aligns with market expectations.
Validate ideas prior to full-scale development: Test concepts and hypotheses through experimentation before committing extensive resources to product development.
Recognize and overcome incremental plateaus: When improvements stall, adopt a fresh perspective and explore alternative strategies rather than remaining confined to a local maximum.
Adopt innovative tools and methodologies: Stay open to promising techniques that may enhance productivity and innovation.
Ensure that the team possesses the requisite skills: Identify and address skill gaps through strategic hiring, targeted training, or collaboration with external experts.
Foster effective team collaboration: Encourage robust teamwork and clear communication to enhance overall product development.

In Summary

Although the selection and quality of Product Discovery activities are critical, the overall volume of activities is not the primary concern. The main objective is to gather robust evidence that supports evidence-based decisions regarding whether a problem is worth solving and whether a solution is worth pursuing.

Key Takeaways

Investment in Customer Development: Every hour spent on customer development can save multiple hours in writing, coding, and design efforts.
Challenging Initial Assumptions: The goal is to systematically disprove assumptions about what customers desire so that efforts can be concentrated on building products that truly satisfy market demand.
Universal Applicability of Customer Development: Methodologies for customer development benefit organizations of all sizes, not exclusively startups.
Complementarity with Product Development: Customer development does not supplant product development; rather, it supports the simultaneous growth of a customer base and the development of tailored solutions that address their specific problems.
Informed Product Management: Insights gained from customer development inform strategic product management decisions regarding both what to build and how to prioritize features.
Mitigating Cognitive Bias: It is essential to actively seek disconfirming evidence, as cognitive biases naturally lead to the preferential recognition of information that supports existing assumptions while neglecting contradictory data.

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