The product discovery process: Steps, tools, and benefits
Last updated: March 2025
Product discovery is about deeply understanding customer needs so you can build products people love. It involves identifying a worthwhile problem, determining the best solution, and adapting to changing customer and business needs.
Customer interviews are an integral part of product discovery. By engaging directly with end users, teams gain valuable insights into their needs and preferences. But listening to customers about what they want and how they use your offering is just one component of product discovery. You also need a process for adding the most compelling insights to your product roadmap. Otherwise, great ideas get lost or forgotten instead of implemented.
Link customer research to product decisions with Aha! Discovery.
Historically, companies invested in discovery before launching new products or adding major functionality. But today, discovery is increasingly seen as a continuous process that happens throughout the product lifecycle. AI is fueling an exponential software expansion in which code can be written and produced faster than ever. This forces product development teams to shift their thinking from, "Can we build this?" to, "Should we build this?" Companies that understand their customers best and have a structured pipeline connecting discovery to delivery will enjoy a competitive edge.
This guide covers everything you need to know to improve your discovery process from a product builder's perspective. Keep reading or use the following links to jump ahead to a specific section:
What is product discovery?
Product discovery is essential to building valuable products. It is where teams research, test, and refine ideas — ensuring what they build aligns with real customer needs. Effective discovery guides product decisions and helps teams stay focused on solutions that deliver meaningful impact.
Many teams struggle with this. They make product decisions in a top-down way, often based on formal, project-driven research. Data and insights are scattered and disconnected, leaving teams without a cohesive view of the customer landscape. For example, if you rely solely on an annual customer survey to set feature priorities, you likely find that some features are outdated by launch time.
The most effective teams treat continuous discovery as a collaborative process driven by real-time insights. Product discovery is:
Ongoing: Discovery happens all the time, allowing teams to pivot based on new data.
Inclusive: Product teams rely on teammates from all functional areas to contribute their insights, enabling richer perspectives and faster iteration.
Real-time: Product teams are able to glean insights from customer interviews and take action on them quickly to improve the offering.
Centralized: Teammates store information in a single, accessible repository — so everyone can quickly refer to interview transcripts and other types of customer research.
Transparent: Decisions are open, data-driven, and aligned with customer priorities, which minimizes guesswork.
Continuous discovery keeps you connected to what matters most: your customers. By making discovery a core ongoing practice, product teams can align more closely with users and deliver solutions with confidence.
Why is product discovery important?
Product discovery requires deep empathy for customers and a genuine grasp of their struggles. Successful product builders go beyond a surface understanding of who their users are — they internalize their problems and anticipate those users' needs as their own.
If you are passionate about building a lovable product‚ you must also be passionate about knowing and loving the customer.
Brian de HaaffAha! co-founder and CEO
The ability to grasp exactly who your customers are and what they want has never been more essential. As the software industry leverages AI to produce more code faster (and cheaper) than before, the time and resources needed to create new product functionality shrink. With a glut of software available on the market, the companies that succeed will be the ones that invest in understanding what customers need. This means establishing a product discovery strategy and process that empowers the team to gain insights from end users — then implementing the best ones quickly.
A strong discovery process adds clarity and structure to product development. It helps you move past initial assumptions, validate customer problems with data, and ensure solutions provide real value. This holistic understanding of customer needs is vital for maximizing the impact of your product work.
Product discovery helps teams:
Empathize: Adopt a customer-centric mindset toward product development
Innovate: Generate new ideas for more lovable products
Prioritize: Focus on features that create the most customer happiness
Reduce risk: Make sure the product delivers value, is easy to use, is realistic to build, and aligns with business goals
By investing in product discovery, your team lays the foundation for building products that truly resonate with customers, driving long-term success throughout the entire product lifecycle.
Related:
What makes product discovery challenging?
Product discovery is some of the most essential and dynamic work in product development. Excelling at it requires skill, commitment, and a drive to build the best offering possible. It can also be incredibly challenging for product teams to do well, for several reasons:
Challenge | Consequences |
It is unclear who to involve. |
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Coordinating conversations is manual and time-consuming. |
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There is no central place to store all interviews. |
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The team lacks experience structuring customer research and scripts. |
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There is no structure for deriving insights and connecting them to product decisions. |
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Great product teams establish a structure for discovery efforts. This means having a central repository for customer research and interview transcripts as well as a clear process for transforming insights into actual work.
Using tools like Aha! Discovery and Aha! Roadmaps together makes it easy to link your research to the strategic planning process. You can tie customer interviews directly to existing work, like initiatives, releases, epics, and features — helping you refine and improve your offering throughout the product lifecycle.
When should you not do product discovery?
Customer interviews are a powerful tool, but they are not always the right first step. In some cases, market research and competitive analysis provide more immediate value — especially when validating broad assumptions or exploring a new space.
For example, if you are refining an early-stage concept, gathering data on market trends and existing solutions can offer the context you need before speaking with customers. Or if you are optimizing an existing feature, A/B testing or usage analytics might offer clearer insights than formal interviews. The key is knowing when direct customer input is essential and when other methods will get you further, faster.
Related:
What does the product discovery process entail?
Product discovery is one stage in the broader product development process. Keep in mind that the stages below are not absolutely discrete or linear — they often overlap. (For example, you likely engage in research and ideation during the discovery stage as well as other times, such as when you capture feedback and explore concepts.)
Strategize: Set a clear vision and key goals.
Discover: Conduct customer interviews to uncover product insights.
Capture: Centralize customer feedback.
Explore: Brainstorm and refine concepts on a whiteboard.
Plan: Prioritize features, estimate value, and manage capacity.
Showcase: Share the roadmap and go-to-market plans.
Build: Deliver new functionality via agile development.
Document: Create a product information hub.
Launch: Bring exciting new capabilities to market.
Analyze: Assess realized product value by tracking customer use and love.
Now, let's discuss the stages of product discovery. Although these vary across organizations, the general process involves understanding customer needs and validating that understanding. Like product development, these phases are not necessarily linear. After evaluating an idea, you might realize assumptions were off and return to the research and ideate stages to refine.
Here is an overview of what the stages of product discovery might look like:
Research
Document the research goals and workflow. (This customer research plan template can help.)
Identify how to connect with prospective customers and decide on any incentives.
Coordinate meetings, attend them, capture notes, and send follow-ups.
Ideate
Gather insights with the team, brainstorm potential solutions, and refine interview questions based on early findings.
Evaluate
Analyze feedback, look for patterns, and discuss findings with cross-functional teams.
Adjust plans and your roadmap based on validated insights.
Prioritize
Determine the highest-impact features based on customer needs and business goals.
Align on priorities and reflect these on the roadmap.
Prototype
Build prototypes to address prioritized needs.
Use insights to shape product direction and prepare for testing.
Test
Share prototypes with users (internal and external) for feedback, noting responses and identifying areas for refinement.
Notify participants about new features shaped by their input to close the feedback loop.
Establishing a robust product discovery process is vital for building lovable products. When you are able to zoom in on exactly what people need and how you will deliver it, you can begin bringing greater value to customers and the business.
Related:
Which tools support product discovery?
The way we see it, every high-performing product team needs a robust research practice as well as a pipeline for turning customer insights into action. In order to achieve this and excel at product discovery, teams should strengthen the following six core competencies:
Market assessment: You have a solid understanding of the playing field.
Competitive position: You can identify where you fit within that playing field.
Strategy: You have a differentiated approach to winning.
Customer feedback: You listen to what people say they want and need.
Customer research: You dig deeper to find out what they really need.
Product usage data: You have a basic understanding of what parts of your application people use most.
Product teams need a unified platform that brings these core competencies (and more) together. The Aha! software suite provides everything you need to imagine, plan, build, and deliver more lovable products. This includes:
Aha! Roadmaps: The complete product management solution — set strategy, prioritize features, and share visual plans.
Aha! Discovery: The new way to manage customer interviews — centralize meeting transcripts, uncover key product insights, and link them to your roadmap.
Aha! Ideas: The comprehensive idea management solution — crowdsource feedback, engage your community, and prioritize what drives revenue.
Aha! Whiteboards: The visual space for product innovation — define user flows, create mockups, and collaborate on roadmaps.
Aha! Knowledge: The AI-powered product information hub — share all of your documents in a central place.
Aha! Develop: The agile tool that links strategy to delivery — for technical leaders who want to ensure product and engineering work well together.
AI has become a transformative part of product development. We have a built-in AI assistant across our product suite that helps teams quickly draft product documentation, refine content, and analyze data. In Aha! Discovery, this powerful AI functionality transcribes customer interviews and uncovers high-level themes and patterns across transcripts. It also analyzes user insights to determine the most impactful ones.
Close collaboration between product management, product marketing, designers, and developers is essential to create a product that truly resonates with customers. Everyone in the organization has valuable insights to share about customer needs, product performance, and areas for improvement — including customers themselves. By speaking directly with customers and asking thoughtful questions, you move beyond surface-level personas to deeply understand and internalize their struggles.
FAQs about product discovery
Keeping research organized is crucial for effective product discovery. Many teams still manage discovery research with a smattering of tools: spreadsheets, docs, whiteboards, and more. But having a central database for all customer interviews makes it easy for the entire team to access and take action on key insights. We recommend using Aha! Knowledge to create an internal knowledge base and Aha! Discovery to organize your interviews and build an efficient research to roadmap pipeline.
Product managers and entrepreneurs usually lead product discovery, but it works best with cross-functional involvement. Anyone responsible for gathering insights, understanding customers, and influencing product decisions should be involved in the discovery process. This includes UX researchers and designers, engineers, and customer-facing teams. Including these different stakeholders early and often ensures alignment and a strong understanding of customer needs.
Product discovery tools help with gathering user feedback, documenting and organizing research, ideation, and prioritization. Aha! Discovery is a purpose-built tool for building a robust research practice and discovering key product insights. You can streamline how product and user research teams interview customers, create a repository for those interviews, and link research to product decisions and the roadmap.
