Product Discovery Activities by Risk

This post will help you identify the right activities to do in product discovery.

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Hey I’m Ant and welcome to my newsletter where you will find practical lessons on building Products, Businesses and being a better Leader

You might have missed these recent posts:
- OKRS ≠ Strategy
- Building Effecive Product Roadmaps
- Breaking Product Discovery into First Principles

My day job is helping companies shift to a Product Operating Model.
My evening job is helping product people master their craft with Product Pathways.

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A quick one from me this week.

I’ve shared this list on LinkedIn and X a few times now, and it’s gone viral every time - people clearly find it valuable.

So it’s time to share it here too and add some context.

Product Discovery activities listed by risk

One of the challenges with Product Discovery is that it’s elusive.

It’s tricky to pin down and turn into a step-by-step process.

This is because your discovery activities are driven by your context.

In other words, I can’t tell you to ‘build a prototype and test it’ because you might be super early in the problem space and have no idea of what the solution might look like yet.

So, how do you identify what makes sense or not?

This is where we need to go back to first principles for Product Discovery.

What is product discovery?

Product Discovery is a de-risking activity.

More specifically, we reduce 3 major risks:

• Desirability

• Viability

• and Feasibility

Now, you can break these into sub-categories like usability, ethical, sustainable, valuable, etc.

But they all roll up into one or more of these 3 categories.

To help us determine our risks, we look at our assumptions.

Behind every idea are a bunch of assumptions and beliefs that have led you to think that this is a problem worth solving and a viable solution.

Assumptions left unchecked are risks because what if our assumption was wrong?

Now, some assumptions are more risky than others. If we’re wrong about them, our whole idea will fail.

These are known as your riskiest assumptions and where we should focus product discovery.

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This is why I’m such a big advocate for kicking off product discovery with tools like Assumptions Mapping by David J Bland.

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Therefore, what you do in product discovery is driven by the assumptions you need to test (aka your riskiest assumptions).

The problem is that “it depends” isn’t helpful.

As someone who coaches and teaches product discovery, I never want to be the “it depends” person and just leave it there. I know that’s not helpful.

This is why I ended up creating this cheat sheet.

It’s since gone through a few iterations—for example, usability was split out based on feedback. Having it separate seemed to better fit most people’s heuristics.

Here’s the list:

💰 Viability Risk:

• Market Analysis

• Market sizing

• Segmentation

• Competitor Analysis

• Perceptual Mapping / Positioning Research

• Customer interviews

• Business modeling

• Price Testing

• Forecasting

• Kano Analysis

• Analytics

• etc…

❤️ Desirability Risk:

• Customer interviews

• Ethnographic Research

• User testing

• Focus Groups

• Surveys

• Observation / Contextual Inquiry

• Prototyping

• 404 / Fake door tests

• A/B Tests

• JTBD Analysis

• Analytics

• Customer Journey Mapping

• etc…

📦 Feasibility Risk:

• Prototyping

• Proof of Concepts (POCs)

• Spikes

• MVP

• Alpha / Beta

• etc…

📱 Usability Risk:

• User testing

• Prototyping

• A/B Tests

• Alpha / Beta

• Accessibility Testing

• Guerilla Testing

• Observation / Contextual Inquiry

• Eye Tracking

• Usability Testing Tools / Platforms (like User Testing . com)

• etc…

It’s important to note that it’s not an 'ultimate list' or 'must-do' activity list.

It’s not exhaustive, either.

I created it as a guide to help give you an idea of some of the discovery activities you might do depending on what assumptions you need to test. You still need to work out what to test and choose how!

Still Struggling?

If you’re still struggling, here’s my recommendation.

Start with one of these 4:

1. Customer Interviews

2. Prototype + User Testing

3. Survey

4. Gathering and analyzing data

These are the 4 most common product discovery activities I find myself doing.

In most cases, you would be well-positioned if you etiher:

• Talk to your customers.

• Put something in front of them (prototype).

• Or gather more data through a survey or by analyzing what you already have.

There’s a real danger in spending too much time trying to pick the perfect ‘test’ that will give you the best results. But quality needs to be offset with speed.

I have an action bias, but I’m sure you’ll agree that speed with imperfect data is typically better than waiting for perfect data.

I hope this and the cheat sheet is helpful.

I’d also recommend checking out Strategyzer's Experiment Library. It’s a go-to resource of mine (or, more specifically, their book Testing Business Ideas is. The library is from the book).

(Sticking the image in once more so you don’t need to scroll to the top)

Product Discovery activities listed by risk

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