Mastering Product Discovery: Unlocking Efficiency with Visual Workflow

Streamlining Product Discovery: The Power of Kanban

As a seasoned product manager, you’re no stranger to the messy, complex world of product discovery. With multiple ideas and problems to tackle simultaneously, it’s easy to lose track of progress, and details can quickly fall through the cracks. That’s why finding a way to organize and streamline the discovery process is crucial for building a healthy product organization.

The Problem with Organizing Discovery

Before we dive into the solution, let’s take a closer look at the main challenges surrounding product discovery. Most product teams struggle with similar issues:

• Difficulty tracking multiple ideas and problems simultaneously
• Inspecting and adapting the discovery process is a challenge
• Fitting discovery work into the sprint cadence can be problematic

Kanban to the Rescue

To solve these problems, you need a process that provides transparency, flexibility, and structure. That’s where Kanban comes in – a framework that visualizes work and work status to create transparency between development teams and the rest of the organization.

Implementing a Discovery Kanban

There are various ways to implement a Kanban into your process. You can differentiate between “high-level” and “low-level” approaches:

High-Level Approach

A high-level discovery Kanban provides a big-picture view of the discovery process, helping you map your work into main, generic chunks. This approach focuses on:

• What the team is working on
• What’s in the pipeline
• Where the bottlenecks are
• Where to focus next

In this approach, you can differentiate between seven main steps:

1. Idea backlog
2. Initial validation
3. Ready for discovery
4. In discovery
5. Ready for UI
6. Designing
7. Ready for development
8. In development

Low-Level Approach

A low-level discovery Kanban splits the process into smaller, more detailed steps, providing a more granular view of the discovery process. This approach is useful for internal process improvement and tracking.

You can use the following ten categories to keep your boards organized:

1. Next topics
2. Problem understanding
3. Initial research
4. Deep-dive discovery (optional)
5. Solution ideation
6. Solution validation
7. Design and prototyping
8. User tests (optional)
9. Improvements
10. Preparing for handoffs

Benefits of a Discovery Kanban

Using a discovery Kanban can bring numerous benefits, including:

• Transparency: Everyone understands what the team is currently exploring
• Better planning: You can assess how much you can plan in the upcoming weeks and guide time investment
• Theming: You can see what themes you’re currently working on and choose the right topics to continue or transition
• Maintaining a healthy design process: The discovery Kanban ensures you complete all mandatory steps required for a design process
• Inspecting and adapting your approach: Visual representation of your workflow helps you continuously improve
• Facilitating day-to-day planning: You can plan tangible goals for the day and the week, staying productive and focused

Is a Discovery Kanban Just a Waterfall in Disguise?

At first glance, the discovery Kanban might seem like an anti-pattern waterfall. However, in practice, topics don’t move linearly. You can move topics back and forth between steps, and create extra “tickets” in the Kanban to maintain transparency.

Final Thoughts

Implementing a discovery Kanban can massively change the quality of your discovery process. It’s not a silver bullet, but it can provide structure and help you navigate the complexity of the process. Start with a simple structure and add new steps as you notice challenges and problems in your discovery work.