Product Discovery and Discovery-driven
Question: What is the difference between product discovery and discovery-driven approaches?
Product Discovery is another name for the Product Definition stage in the PMTK product delivery process.
In this stage, the Product Architect describes the solution and how to build it.
The objective is to build the right product with the correct feature set, adequately solving the market problem.
The idea behind discovery-driven approaches, aka discovery-driven planning, is that newly discovered data is constantly factored into product decisions.
The general premise of discovery-driven approaches is that ongoing customer feedback continually helps test the market's receptiveness to the product and its features and quickly allows for any corrections to marketing activities and product development efforts.
Discovery-driven approaches limitations are:
- They do not scale well, rendering them unsuitable for large and complex projects and products.
- They depend on fluctuating and possibly inconsistent customer feedback which makes the product susceptible to erratic shifts in concept and feature scope (excessive pivoting).
- They can be quite costly if many scoping and architecture corrections are merited.
- They do not provide sufficient and reliable information for making sound strategic decisions.