Being relevant and innovative is becoming harder and harder. it’s imperative that your organization is consistently developing new products. you’ll foster innovation through Product Discovery Workshops – a collaborative method to develop new products and services. Here, we’ll re-evaluate the highest five benefits of why your team should engage during a Product Discovery Workshop.
The start of a project is usually the exciting part. There’s much enthusiasm and energy, ideas are flying, and everyone’s jazzed to be getting started (plus, the realities of the project haven’t set in yet!)
It’s an honest time to be you.
And it’s also an honest time to run a product discovery workshop.
Today, we’re getting to cover exactly what a product discovery workshop is, and therefore the top 5 benefits for why you ought to consider running one.
Here we go!
What is a product discovery workshop?
A product discovery workshop may be a step within the early planning phase of designing and developing a replacement digital product. This is often a chance to stipulate all the core elements of your digital product. At the top of a product discovery workshop, you ought to have defined your:
- Business goals: what high-level business goal/initiative are you trying to impact?
- Product purpose: what’s the purpose of this specific product?
- Function and technology needed: what does this product need to do, and what technology are you getting to use to try to to it?
- Target audience: who is that this product for?
- User persona(s): who’s getting to use this product?
- Success indicators/goals: how will you recognize if you’re successful?
Collectively, these six things should be defined before you begin building because a change in any of them can have an enormous impact on scope, timeline, and functionality. That’s why it’s worth taking the time to run a product discovery workshop early within the process.
Now that we’ve a clearer picture of what a product discovery workshop is, let’s dive into the 5 reasons to try to do one.
- Deliver a far better product
When you plan your product out carefully with a product discovery workshop, you’re tons more likely to deliver a far better project.
First, you’re thinking consciously about what the merchandise must do. That tends to happen less as you get ensorcelled within the actual product delivery.
Second, you’ve got everyone within the room early. This could be external parties, internal projects, and merchandise owners, lines of business heads, and even end-users. That’s a rarity as development continues.
And third, you haven’t invested heavily during a direction yet, making you tons less vulnerable to the sunk cost fallacy that you simply are going to be later. A product discovery workshop gives you space early to believe what you would like to create .
- Reduce cost
Well-planned, intentional products cost less to create . There are fewer products, fewer tweaks, and last-minute changes, and fewer hours spent building something that’s not fit the purpose.
Collectively, this makes the merchandise faster to deliver (more thereon during a second) and fewer expensive to create.
Here are just a couple of ways in which a product discovery workshop can reduce cost:
Reduce scope creep with a well-defined technology and performance requirements.
Better feature alignment and definition zeros product scope in on the features end-users care about, meaning you’ve got to create less and thus, spend less.
Team alignment prevents rework and changes — both of which may blow out the budget in a big way.
- Get a product out the door faster
This will come as no surprise, but the old adage slow is smooth and smooth is fast applies here in a big way.
When you are struggling , a product discovery workshop can be a waste of your time . After all, you recognize what you’re building! Why bother with this exercise?
In reality, though, you do not know what you are building. A product discovery workshop will assist you get a product shipped sooner by:
- Identifying rabbit holes early and learning to avoid them.
- Clarifying what you’re building and why.
- Allow for rapid iteration early before the merchandise team invests time and energy getting into the incorrect direction.
By taking the time to know the merchandise requirements early, you’ll inevitably save time later (even if it feels slow on the day).
- Reduce product risk
Product risk may be a major challenge. Big digital products can cost tens or many thousands of dollars, not to mention the substantial political capital and cost related to their construction.
At an equivalent time though, digital products have an alarming failure rate, costing organizations and other people success .
By running a product discovery workshop, you maximize the probabilities of that investment paying dividends and reduce the danger of your product tanking.
- Increase the probabilities of building something your audience wants
We mentioned earlier that tons of products fail. Does one know the amount one problems?
The product doesn’t work for the end-user to realize the business goals.
There are only a few samples of digital products that end-users don’t like but find themselves successful anyways (Salesforce could be the exception).
For the overwhelming majority of products, you would like your end-user to truly want to use the merchandise to make their lives easier, and by using the merchandise , they drive towards achieving your overarching business objective.
That’s where the merchandise discovery workshop comes in. By including end-users early , creating that end-user persona early, and mapping out the functionality of the end-user, the merchandise discovery workshop makes it tons more likely that the end-user will actually get a product that works for them. And if you’ll drive end-user adoption, then your product may be a lot more likely to achieve success .
Conclusion
A product discovery workshop isn’t necessary. you’ll build incredible products without them. But here’s what we do know. once you DO run a product discovery workshop, you capture truly invaluable information. Information which will assist you run your development more effectively, reduce cost, reduce timelines, reduce risk, and assist you build a far better product for your end-users.
For us, the merchandise discovery workshop is an integral part of the design process.
