How to do product discovery from a business design perspective
Key takeaways from the EGGS for Breakfast event in Oslo
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At the EGGS for Breakfast event 'Product Discovery’ in EGGS Oslo, we explored examples of inspiring product innovation. Our clients Kongsberg Digital, DeepInsight, and Airthings presented examples from their businesses of how they conduct product discovery. EGGS' business design team, led by Ellen Lidgren, shared insights on working with product discovery from a business design perspective. In this article, you can read a summary of the key takeaways.
“Product discovery is essential to the development process in the same way a map is essential to ships lost at sea.”
Business design in EGGS –‘ Introduction to Product Discovery’
In his presentation, Mons Langaard and Bjørn Molstad introduced us to how the business design team in EGGS works with product discovery – what is it, why, and how can it be used? According to them, product discovery helps you build better products.Before development, while a new product is still just a concept, a process known as product discovery helps put details down on paper that can dictate whether it will succeed or fail.
There are five primary drivers where we can look for insight in this early-phase discovery, namely:
Market– what competitors are there? What’s available, and not?
Needs – what are the needs?
Context – what does the context around the product look like?
Social drivers – what social factors interfere?
Emotional drivers – what emotional connection exists or can be created?
The main advantages of product discovery are:
It helps you establish a target audience
Reducing production costs
Increasing product value
Revealing risks
One of the main challenges in working with product discovery is ensuring that the organisation is rigged to work with it continuously. This is not easy, but it is crucial to success.
DeepInsight - ‘From consulting to a product-led customer offering’
Norwegian-based DeepInsight, also a client of EGGS, is a company that has gathered some of the best people within mathematics and coding to develop solutions to improve the health sector and the quality of health services. In their presentation, they shared how they’ve worked to go from consulting to product-led offering and how they have identified and created a product portfolio. According to them, it's essential to remember the following three steps in this process:
Work thoroughly to identify problems and ideas
Get an understanding of the problems and how attractive they are to solve
Concretize – test your solutions on users and experiment as much and as early as possible
Kongsberg Digital - 'K-Sim - Reinventing maritime training and education
Our client Kongsberg Digital shared their inspiring ‘K-Sim’ project – their solution that provides maritime students with access to a complete training package in the cloud. In this project, they developed a new industry-leading product that accommodates all necessary and required functionality for students operating electronic charts, route planning, and navigation. It recently became the first cloud-based training solution to gain the new DNV class D certification.You can read more about the project and EGGS’ contribution in this article.
Airthings- 'Airthings, framing exploration’
Jørgen Solstad, Head of Consumer Products at Airthings, shared his perspective and experiences from different approaches to product discovery, from development to market adoption.
His key message was the importance of defining focus areas to work within when working with product discovery. This is to avoid losing focus and depth and to be able to reach concrete and actionable results.
