Product Discovery: From Assumptions to Confident Decisions

Product discovery is a disciplined practice that helps product managers move from assumption-driven thinking to evidence-based decision-making. Product discovery is understanding the pain points of your customers. It is about reducing risk, aligning teams around the right problems, and ensuring that what you build creates real value for customers and your business.

Product discovery is broken into two major phases: identifying problems to solve and identifying potential solutions.

The Problem Space: Identifying the Right Problems to Solve

When looking for opportunities there is some research that is needed in order to get started. Below outlines a few ways to collect the data needed to inform a hypothesis.

Understand Market Context- Scanning your environment for macro and micro trends

Before tackling any project, a Product Manager must understand the context of their industry. Macro trends are large universal trends that have the potential to affect your industry and the economy, things such as digitization or aging populations. You can also spot macro trends in specific industries, like the use of artificial intelligence.

Micro trends are the patterns you notice in response to macro trends. By analyzing micro trends you can prepare for the future and enter new products or features to market, hopefully before your competition. Things such as remote-monitoring wearables or AI assisted diagnostics are micro-trends.

Many industries are vast and broad so narrowing down the industry is most helpful. There are many different ways to narrow down your research but starting with trends affecting the market your company currently serves is usually a good approach. Some ways to narrow down research:

• By technology- for example, how is artificial intelligence being used in healthcare today and how could it apply to telemedicine?

• By persona- for example, what is the biggest pain point of the clinic’s admin?

• By geography- for example, what do people in North America expect from their physician practices vs. people in Asia?

• By demographic- for example, how many Seniors are lacking health care and why?

Assess the Competitive Landscape- Who is also in this problem space?

It’s good to keep an eye on competitors without obsessing over them. The goal is not feature parity with competitors but it is interesting to see what problems they are solving, how they are solving them, and if it meets market needs. For example, Nokia made cell phones that were the hottest phone on the market in 2006. iPhone made a different type of phone solving other problems and disrupted Nokia. Nokia optimized existing solutions, while Apple reframed the problem and redefined the market.

Learn from Customer Data- What are they asking for?

Customers often ask for specific solutions, but those requests are proxies for underlying problems. Effective discovery looks beneath the surface.

Customer insights can come from:

• Product instrumentation and usage data

• Sales and customer support conversations

• Surveys, NPS, and third-party feedback tools

• Lightweight experiments that test interest and behavior

Once we have a hypothesis, we will identify our assumptions about the problem and about our users.

Identify Assumptions

People tend to fall in love with their ideas. Confirmation bias justifies our ideas even more. Re-training ourselves to be willing to be wrong is a big step in understanding if you are solving the right problem.

1. Make a list of all of your assumptions about the opportunity. It is great to include your discovery team in this exercise. Have each of them list their assumptions, and then meet to review them. 

2. Formulate questions to ask customers that will either validate or invalidate your assumptions

Identify Personas and Outcomes

Discovery is not complete without clarity on:

• Who the solution is for

• What success looks like if the problem is solved

• Why this problem aligns (or does not align) with the product’s mission and strategy

Test Assumptions

Talk with at least 5 potential users to test your assumptions. Iterate on your questions as you learn more from your interviews. Once your assumptions are tested, you can make the decision to explore solutions to solve the problem or abandon the problem and explore a different one.

The Solution Space: Validating What Might Work

When we decide on the problem we want to solve, then we can then begin to identify potential solutions.

Ideation and Story Mapping

1. Generate a list of ideas that solve the problem.

2. Story map your ideas to get specific on how they might work. A story map is the steps a user must go through to get value from your solution. To story map, assume the solution already exists. Identify the Actors (who needs to interact with whom) for the idea to work. Map out the steps each actor has to take in order to get value out of your solution. Map these steps horizontally. Your story map will help you generate more assumptions to test with customers.

3. You should test at least 3 ideas, so repeat the story map process for 3 ideas.

4. Identify outcomes- What does success look like for your customers? What needs to be true in order for you to decide to build your solution?

Prototyping and Testing

Rather than perfecting a single idea, build multiple lightweight prototypes to test with customers during your usability interviews. Having multiple options allows you to iterate to the best solution based on the feedback from the users. Testing different approaches with users enables teams to learn faster and converge on solutions with confidence.

When testing prototypes it is important to allow the user to explore the prototype and figure out the tasks you are asking them to do on their own. You are not testing the users’ ability, you are testing your prototype. If users struggle to figure out how to interact with the prototype, then you may need to revisit the design.

Enabling Continuous Discovery

Discovery is not a one-time event. Sustainable product organizations create systems that support ongoing learning.

Key enablers include:

• A clearly defined discovery team responsible for customer engagement

• Lightweight recruiting models that allow customers to self-schedule conversations

• Standardized documentation and communication of insights across teams

These practices ensure discovery remains continuous, visible, and impactful.

Closing Thought

Product discovery is a product manager super power. When done well, it creates alignment, reduces risk, and builds confidence in the decisions teams make every day.

If your teams are struggling to move from ideas to outcomes—or if discovery feels inconsistent, informal, or disconnected from strategy—fluent helps organizations design discovery practices that actually work in the real world.

We partner with leaders to strengthen discovery, align teams, and enable confident decision-making.Let’s explore what effective discovery could look like in your organization.

About the Author

Melody Yale is a Managing Director at fluent, where she partners with product and technology leaders to strengthen product discovery, decision-making, and operating models. She brings deep experience helping organizations move from assumption-driven thinking to outcome-focused execution.