A step-by-step guide to the product discovery process

Outstanding product discovery is the foundation of successful product delivery. Yet too many product teams move forward based on assumptions—about what users want, which problems are worth solving, or where the biggest opportunities lie. 

As a result, they often end up building products that need to be justified to users, instead of building ones that respond directly to real user needs.

When done well, discovery helps teams avoid costly missteps. It reduces reliance on internal opinions or hunches, and shifts the focus toward evidence-based decisions. Instead of guessing what might work, teams can design and deliver with confidence—knowing their choices are grounded in actual user insight.

While no two companies run discovery the same way, the goal is always the same: to uncover the information you need to build products that are not only usable, but truly useful. The right discovery framework helps prioritize what matters, align stakeholders around clear goals, and ensure your time and resources are spent solving the right problems.

The problem space and solution space 

So what does product discovery look like? 

There are two key phases:

1. The problem space, where you try to reach a deep understanding of your users’ problems

2. The solution space, where you develop, test, and refine solutions that effectively address these problems through your product

A common pitfall seen in product discovery is jumping too quickly into the solution space before fully understanding your customers’ problems. 

Learning (and re-learning) what your users want to do and what’s blocking them should come first. 

In continuous product discovery processes, the problem and solution spaces inform one another, which means that even when you’re focused on finding or prototyping a solution, you should always keep the problems you’re trying to solve in mind.

And when you start to grasp the problems your users have, keep one eye one potential solutions.

8 steps to effective product discovery

Understanding the principles of product discovery is a good start—but what’s really important is putting them into practice. 

Follow this step-by-step guide to improve your product discovery process. 

1. Set up your product discovery crew

First, decide who should be involved in the product discovery process. 

Go beyond the standard product management team structure here. Cross-functional collaboration between product, design, and engineering team members is key to ensuring technical viability and user focus.

It’s also important to include stakeholders from business and marketing departments for a holistic view of the product, user base, and business targets. 

Involving different stakeholders makes confirmation bias less likely in your product discovery process. Getting a range of different perspectives can help you challenge the assumptions of any single department, team, or individual.

But too many different contributors can also make product discovery chaotic and unwieldy. Put together a core product discovery crew who’ll own the process, then strategically involve additional stakeholders as needed. 

The main discovery crew usually consists of: 

• PMs

• UX and user research reps

• A frontend and backend engineering lead

Once you’ve got your product discovery leaders, decide who will be on the second tier. These are the people you’ll keep updated on how the product discovery process is going, and you’ll bring them in to collaborate during particular stages. They usually include

• Marketers

• Sales reps

• Developers

• Customer support or success reps

• Other product team members and engineers

💡Pro tip: use tools that make it easy to share your learnings with your core product discovery crew and other stakeholders. 

For example, Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool lets you share snapshots from user sessions with your team members.

For added impact, use Contentsquare’s Slack integration to send stakeholders regular insights on the communication channels they already use.

2. Do exploratory research on user needs

Once you’ve got your product crew sorted, it’s time to learn about user problems. 

Try to put your assumptions—and your product ideas—aside, and just get to know your users or potential users. As product discovery guru Teresa Torres says, ​​“Customers know more than we’ll ever know about their needs and context.”  So talk to them—learn what they do and about their jobs to be done (JTBDs). Find out who they are, and create user and product personas to bring demographics to life and cultivate deep user empathy.  

Use specific techniques like customer interviews, user stories, surveys, and session recordings that show you how users behave and experience your product or other similar products. (Remember: Contentsquare’s tools can help!) 

When surveying customers or running interviews, remember that you’re trying to explore at this stage rather than validate fixed ideas you already have. Ask open-ended questions and give users a chance to tell you things you don’t already know.

💡Pro tip: Contentsquare’s Surveys tool helps you ask open-ended questions at scale—so you can uncover unexpected insights, not just confirm what you think you know. Use it to dig into the why behind user behavior, in their own words.

3. Define the problem

Now that you’ve gathered user data, you need to analyze it properly to turn the data into actionable insights. 

Map out user stories to identify patterns or topics that are repeated again and again from different users and user sources. Refine these topics into key user problems and use them to develop broad and specific discovery questions and hypotheses. 

For example, an automated subtitling software company might ask

• How can we meet our users’ need to integrate our solutions into their wider workflow? 

• Why aren’t our users adopting our new video editing feature? Is their external video editing program solving their problems better—or are they just reluctant to adapt to a new tool? 

Test these hypotheses to confirm they accurately describe what your users are thinking and feeling before moving on.

4. Come up with possible solutions

Only once you have a strong sense of user problems should you start thinking about solutions. 

Be as creative as possible in brainstorming solutions. Use mind mapping and storyboarding to get your team to think outside the box, and encourage even unworkable ideas to get the creative juices flowing—you can always refine them later. 

It’s good to involve as many cross-functional roles as possible in the brainstorming process to innovate potential solutions from different perspectives. 

When the team has generated too many ideas to consider, you can vote on them to narrow down the list before deciding which to validate. 

5. Validate and prioritize proposed solutions

Next, engage in internal and external validation processes to check whether the solutions you’re considering are viable and feasible.

Validating ideas internally may involve consulting with different stakeholders to determine their usability, feasibility, or technical solutions. You may also want to do some opportunity mapping—by using a value curve, for example, where you compare your solution to the market—to determine whether your solution will meet business goals. 

It’s also critical to validate ideas with current or potential users. You can do this through user interviews and surveys, or run A/B tests to choose between possible solutions (for example, analyze heatmaps for both solutions to see where users clicked and engaged). 

Consider fake door testing, too, where you put a link to a product or feature that doesn’t exist yet on your product or webpage. By seeing how many people click on the link, you can gauge user interest, then use feedback widgets or surveys to ask them why they clicked. 

Validating ideas shows you which ideas to proceed with and helps you prioritize the most important initiatives. 

💡Pro tip: Contentsquare’s Interviews tool helps you stress-test your ideas with the people who matter most—your users. 

Whether you’re exploring desirability, uncovering edge cases, or pressure-testing two competing concepts, live interviews give you the depth surveys can’t. It’s your shortcut to surfacing dealbreakers early and prioritizing what actually deserves a spot on the roadmap.

6. Prototype and test

Test your product using mockups and prototypes to compensate for possible discrepancies between how users respond to a product idea and how they experience it. 

For example, maybe users tell you they want new video editing features on the dashboard of your subtitling software. However, when you put the new features on the dashboard, they clutter their view and prevent them from having a streamlined product experience. You won’t know this until you test. 

There are different ways of doing this: you can build mockups or clickable prototypes, or even observe users as they use similar products, seeing what does and doesn’t solve their problems. Work towards developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that you can run more tests with. 

💡Pro tip: use Contentsquare’s User Tests tool to run unmoderated usability tests on mockups and clickable prototypes.

Set tasks and observe how real users interact with your beta or new product and features. It’s a fast, low-effort way to catch confusing flows or unclear CTAs—so you can build smarter from the start.

7. Get aligned with stakeholders

Once you’ve rigorously tested possible solutions, you’ll need to present them to a range of different stakeholders. 

If you’ve followed all the steps, you should have a wealth of data on user needs and responses to back up your proposals. 

Communicating a rich range of quantitative and qualitative data is the best way to make a compelling case for stakeholder buy-in.

Show statistics that demonstrate how your ideas will contribute to user satisfaction and business objectives, and include qualitative VoC data like customer quotes from surveys and user feedback. 

8. Infuse the design and delivery process with continuous discovery

Product discovery doesn’t end once you start—or even finish—product development and delivery. 

To ensure your product meets your users’ deepest needs, engage in continuous discovery throughout the entire product lifecycle. 

Create regular touchpoints in the design and delivery process to check in with users and stakeholders and validate each iteration as you go for agile product management.

Why communication is key to effective product discovery

Nailing the product discovery process is a crucial part of building stronger connections with your customers and business stakeholders. 

Communication is at the heart of successful product discovery and product management. 

Pinning down users’ problems—and what will solve them—is all about being curious, listening deeply, and asking the right questions at the right stage in the user journey.

Contentsquare helps by providing a constant stream of digital experience insights that help the whole company understand what users want at varying levels of detail.

By involving the whole team in the product discovery process, you’ll promote ownership, pride, and the motivation to build brilliant products that customers love.

FAQs about the product discovery process