Product Discovery using the 3W3 Framework
According to the late Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, each year 30,000 new products are launched — and 95 percent of them fail. It is clear that:
- Most new product ideas fail
- It is difficult to predict which ideas will succeed and which won’t, irrespective of how senior and experienced you are
Therefore, the sooner we can discover if our product ideas won’t work, the better it is because we will save both time and money by not working on the wrong ones.
Product discovery is the process of ideating and ascertaining if, why, and which ideas should be built into products or features.
Purposeful product discovery helps mitigate the 4 big risks:
- Value risk (whether customers will buy it or users will choose to use it)
- Usability risk (whether users can figure out how to use it)
- Feasibility risk (whether our engineers can build what we need with the time, skills, and technology we have)
- Business viability risk (whether this solution also works for the various aspects of our business)
Product discovery requires both intuition & a logical approach
“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” –Albert Einstein
This quote by Albert Einstein captures the essence of what is Product Space vs. Solution Space. Unlike Engineers and Designers who spend most of their time solving a given problem, Product Managers must spend most of their time evaluating which problems are valuable to solve, then framing the problems well, and finally validating if the product solutions to these problems are usable, useful, and viable.
On a recent hiking trail at the McArthur-Burney Falls Memorial State Park
Successful product discovery requires both intuition and logic. Either logic or intuition alone is insufficient in predicting product success. While we can use the methods of logic to check a proof, we must also use our vision and intuition to create it. And we need a structured, logical approach to organize and frame the problem well so that we can solve it effectively.
Introducing: The 3W3 Product Discovery Framework
The 3W3 Product Discovery Framework answers the 3W’s — Why, Who, & What of the Problem Space, 3 levels deep. It is a way to create structure, logically organize and frame the Problem Space well so that we can mitigate the value risk and business viability risk — thus reducing the likelihood of our product solution being a failure. Mitigating the usability risk and feasibility risk requires answering the “How” questions at multiple levels and, therefore, belong to the Solution Space — not a part of this framework.
The 3W3 Product Discovery Framework
WHY?
Always start with WHY. In the context of Product Discovery, we need to start with the real user problem and WHY it needs to be solved. Understanding the WHY will help in problem discovery and opportunity validation. Toyota’s 5-Whys technique is a good first step to get to the real user problem. We can then validate it using both qualitative and quantitative research to know more about it, how often they experience it, and how large is the market demand for solving it.
WHY-NOW?
We also need to understand if NOW is the right time to introduce our product in the market. We need to estimate how pervasive is the WHY, how big is its market, how much and how soon it can grow. Additionally, we need to know if the ecosystem around our product is already available and mature. For example, Uber’s mobile app wouldn’t be so successful if it was introduced before the smartphone revolution, the availability of the App Store and Google Maps API, and fast-and-cheap cellular data — that is, its ecosystem. Lastly, we also need to consider if there are current market trends that may act as the tailwinds or headwinds for our product. For example, the past year and a half saw very little travel due to the Covid-19 lockdowns and most people working from home. Clearly, any travel-related customer problems wouldn’t appear as pervasive or important so it was not the right time to launch a travel product. But now that the travel industry has started to pick up again and revenge-travel will be the rage over the next couple of years, it may be a good time to launch a travel product that solves a real user problem, uniquely. Therefore, answering “WHY-NOW?” will increase the likelihood of finding the Product-Market-Time fit early.
WHY-US?
We also need to understand why are we or our company uniquely positioned to solve the real user problem and what’s in it for us or our company to pursue this opportunity i.e., our WIIFM. We need to consider which market we can play in, where we can win, and the advantages that qualify us and our company to solve the WHY — uniquely. Additionally, we need to evaluate how crowded is the market that we want to play in and how tailored is our product strategy to leverage our specific assets and powers such that the same strategy is unlikely to work for a competitor. We also need to ensure that the WHY aligns with our company’s vision, mission, and strategy. It is prudent to stick to our existing markets, or sometimes explore the near, adjacent, or peripheral markets; but usually, avoid the markets that are too far off from our core competencies and our business and product strategy. For example, while it may make sense for Apple or Google to pursue the autonomous car market due to their existing competencies in cloud computing and AI, it wouldn’t make sense for Ford or GM to pursue the smartphone or cloud computing markets.
WHO?
“Great companies always ask who before asking what.” –Jim Collins, Good to Great,
We need to focus on WHO — our product’s target customers. While we may think that our product’s end-users are its target customers, often there are additional personas involved. Broadly, there are buyer and user personas. For example, the Disney+ streaming app is mainly used by children but their parents ultimately decide whether to subscribe to it or not. Therefore, children here are its user persona and their parents, its buyer persona. Children watching the Disney+ app need its user interface to be easy to access and content to be exciting and colorful. Parents, on the other hand, need the ability to control the access and content to be aligned with their values. This is often the case for most B2B enterprise products — there are separate user and buyer personas involved. We need to consider both their needs and make our product appealing to both. To do that, we need to understand each of their personalities, ask them questions that pass Rob Fitzpatrick’s “Mom Test,” and also map the user and buyer journeys that describe when and how they would interact with our product. Additionally, we need to find out the relative importance of the customer problem compared to all the other problems they are trying to solve for themselves and their business, i.e., Customer Problem Stack Rank (CSPR), to ascertain that our product is solving ‘the’ customer problem and not just ‘a’ customer problem.
WHO-ELSE?
Furthermore, we can categorize our users into primary users and secondary users. While primary users are the majority we are targeting, secondary users may or may not actively use our product themselves but they certainly influence our buyers’ decision to buy it and our primary users’ decision to use it. For example, for most B2B enterprise products our primary users’ Supervisors are usually our secondary users because they’d like to gain better visibility into what their team is doing and be able to measure their progress and our product’s value as they use it. The company’s IT team is also usually our secondary user because they would like to oversee our product’s use, be able to maintain it easily, and integrate it with their existing systems and processes seamlessly. Similarly, the company’s InfoSec team or Compliance Officers would want to make sure that our product complies with established standards, security policies, and certifications. Hence, it is essential to identify them and understand their needs too.
WHO-NOT?
If we try to build it for everyone, we will end up building it for no one. Trying to build a product for everyone either makes it too complex for everyone or dilutes it for any meaningful utility. Therefore, it is also essential to decide which users we will NOT actively target. We don’t need to ignore them, but we needn’t specifically build for them. In his Masters of Scale strategy episode, Reid Hoffman talks about how, while building LinkedIn, they ignored their most active and vocal group of users — LinkedIn Open Networkers or LIONs — who wanted it to be an open network where everyone could connect to anyone. Knowing whom we don’t want to actively target will also make our product’s messaging simple, succinct, and specific to the users that we do want to target. That is how Steve Jobs re-positioned Apple with his “Think Different” campaign when he returned to Apple in 1996. Instead of diluting the message by positioning it to everyone, the Mac was supposed to be for the artists, the creatives, and the “crazy ones.” Identifying who NOT to target is even more important for B2B enterprise products so that Marketing can position them accordingly and Sales can qualify out the personas they don’t need to actively pursue selling to.
WHAT?
The WHAT is any product idea that solves the WHY (the real user problem) for its WHO (the users). Knowing our WHYs & WHOs will help us ideate & filter out our WHATs effectively. This will help us narrow down to fewer solutions that are valuable, usable, feasible, & viable. There is usually more than one solution to any user problem. Hence, it is a good idea to brainstorm at least 3–5 different solutions to the real user problem so that you can experiment and pick the best one that meets your criteria. For each of these WHATs, we need to connect it back to the WHYs and the WHOs to evaluate if it meets their needs. This will also help us avoid some cognitive biases such as Confirmation Bias or the Ikea Effect.
“If you want to have good ideas, you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.” –Linus Pauling
SO-WHAT?
When was the last time you bought something just because it had amazing specs? Most promotional content these days focuses on what their product ‘does’, along with its specs & all its shiny bells & whistles. These are features — factual, technical, & descriptive aspects of the product. Then, there are its advantages — how it compares to, and what differentiates it from, other similar products. Benefits, on the other hand, are less about the product itself but more about what its users will get out of it, how it will add value to their lives, and how they will feel.
We can review our product’s features and advantages to arrive at its benefits by asking the “SO-WHAT?” question iteratively a few times:
Features (SO-WHAT?) → Advantages (SO-WHAT?) → Benefits (SO-WHAT?) → Ultimate Benefit.
People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want to buy a quarter-inch hole. –Theodore Levitt
For example, consider the quarter-inch drill that Prof. Levitt talks about:
- Feature: A cordless power drill with interchangeable bits. SO-WHAT?
- Advantage: It can be used to make a hole in brickwork or concrete. SO-WHAT?
- Benefit: Being able to hang my daughter’s graduation photo on my wall. SO-WHAT?
- Ultimate Benefit: Feel proud by looking at it every day!
Ultimate benefits align with the customer’s self-interest and ultimately, how they will feel. Some of the things people want are to: be admired, be more productive, be happy, be healthy, have more leisure time, have less stress, look good to others, get promoted, make more money, have less uncertainty, avoid pain, have no guilt, etc. We need to align our product’s WHATs i.e., its features & advantages, with its benefits i.e., our customer’s self-interest & how they feel.
Steve Jobs’ iPod launch keynote is a masterclass for starting with the benefits and then supporting it with the features and advantages — “Your entire music library, 1000 songs in your pocket!”
NOW-WHAT?
The true goal of product discovery is not just the discovery itself but also shipping the product that solves the real customer problem and is valuable, usable, & viable. This requires focussed execution. Usually — as we discussed under the first WHAT — there is more than one idea to solve the problem. Hence, we need to select the opportunities, prioritize, and conduct experiments to test the markets first before we go all-in.
“Fire bullets and then the cannons.” –Jim Collins, Great by Choice
We can use one of the 124 prioritization techniques for opportunity selection and prioritization. And then, run small experiments and iterate until we’ve been able to build the product that not only solves the real customer problem but also mitigates Marty’s 4 big risks. This is where the problem space begins to meet the solution space.
In summary, product discovery is hard. Doing it successfully requires both intuition and a logical approach. The 3W3 Framework is a way to structure the logical approach to product discovery & reduce the likelihood of product failure. So, try it out for your product discovery and let me know your feedback.
