So far in the first half of the quarter, I have collaborated through the product discovery lifecycle. It started with user interviews, which became foundational in later determining product strategy. Having speakers come into class on a weekly basis provided new perspectives and allowed me to practice these skills as we progressed through to more defined sketches of what our product proposal would look like. I found the structure of the class so far, scaffolding our product discovery and research, to be very useful.
Working in a team, I learned skills around delegation of tasks and prioritization. We defined product owners for individual tasks who were responsible for pushing the part of the assignment to completion, while collaborating with others on their task in the process.
I found the process of understanding the business problem fascinating, particularly because we had a significant amount of data and insights in the original description of the business provided. From there, the work to expand that into a proposal took, a few things. The first was user research, as already described. The second was market research, where we looked online at reputable sources to size the market and make realistic projections. The third was brainstorming and problem solving, where creativity and critical thinking were needed to evaluate which proposals would make the most sense given the user interviews and market.
Something we are currently working on is prioritization, which is guided by scoping feature complexity and evaluating user needs. A key consideration in prioritization has been to balance both what users say they want along with what their actions show. For instance, a user may request a specific feature, but if another user churned from our platform for Canva because a specific feature was missing, the latter seems to be more important to fixing our user retention problem. Now, obviously these are fake companies, but conversations via user studies have yielded results that tend to let us predict they would have churned from our platform in its current state.
Overall, the process of creating the product proposal has had significant breadth across different tasks and I am excited to continue expanding these efforts to next steps for gaining clarity on how to get the proposal further to becoming a reality.
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