Building a product in 100 days: Discovery
In my last post I outlined a process that would help in taking a product from concept to release in 100 days. The first stage of which is Discovery.
What is a Discovery day?
This is a session that involves all of the stakeholders for the project, as well as the external product team. The first thing to do is write the goal down somewhere everyone can see it. Write it on the wall and write it big. Taking insurance as an example, this might be something like “Increase the percentage of people who renew their policy after the first year”. This then acts as your key filter. It’s the requirement that every discussion and every idea needs to work towards. It’s amazing how quickly you can end up on a tangent without this goal clearly outlined and visible.
Who should be there?
If the right people aren’t in the room, the session will lose relevance. Depending on the business goal that needs to be achieved, there may be certain specialists or experts who should be on hand. It’s all well and good discussing a solution, but if the people who know whether or not it will be effective aren’t there, it’s all academic. It’s also important that there’s a decision maker or budget holder in the room. This ensures that everything that is discussed and decided has approval.
An example of people to bring, outside of the internal team, for an organisation in the insurance sector might be:
- Brokers — in many cases brokers are the interface between the organisation and the person taking on a policy. Their opinion is therefore very relevant!
- Underwriters — if they’re the ones who are producing the policies and therefore dealing with the data coming in, then they may well have some valuable input.
- Regulators — it’s all well and good creating solutions, but if they’re not going to pass from a legal standpoint then they aren’t valid! People on the compliance and regulation side of things can help to steer the conversation accordingly.
The above is just an example of the sort of experts and specialisms that might be worth bringing into the room. It will obviously depend on your industry and the specific challenges you face.
What do I do!?
It’s time to talk about what it is you might be able to produce! Once a few ideas have been generated, it’s worth picking the ones that appear to offer the most value and get people most excited.
The ideas that show more merit should be explored further. Start to speak about them in real world situations and cover the sort of features that are required. It’s also worth going through the aspects of the new solution that are absolutely required versus the ‘nice to haves’, that could come at a later phase.
Outcomes
The output of this discovery session should be a idea or two that rose above the rest. An initial plan, a top-line business case and buy in from the team are all that is required to move on to the next step.
What you have now is a plan that has been validated internally. If you’ve had people in the room who will use or deal with the final product then you also have the first stages of user validation, a key part of the process of ensuring the goal will be met.
If you’d like to read my post outlining the process as a whole, you can find it here.
