Thank you for sharing your feedback and question Nathan. When you take on an existing product I recommend that you:

• Familiarise yourself with the market / domain the product serves and the category it belongs to, including competing offerings;
• Talk to (some of the) the users and understand why and how they use the product;
• Get to know the key stakeholders and dev team members and build trust with them;
• Review the product strategy, product roadmap, KPIs, business model, and product backlog, preferably together with the stakeholders and dev team reps;
• Get an overview of the technologies used to build the product.

Hope this helps!

First things first – big fan! I recently finished reading your book Agile Product Management with Scrum. Every time I read an article by you or an expert in PM, I uncover a new learning which is amazing. That being said, I’m working on a product that was developed to an extent and stopped. I am now the new PO to take this product forward. Being in the middle of knowledge transfer process, I’d like to understand the things I should keep in mind during discovery, strategy and roadmapping. I know the organisation will have their input. But your thoughts will also help learn and be prepared. Thank you in advance. Call me Nathan. 🙂

Glad my answer was helpful Luke and great follow-up question! I view an idea generation and selection process as the prerequisite for product discovery. Such a process evaluates ideas for new and significantly enhanced products, often according to strategic fit. This ensures that the idea is aligned with the business and product portfolio strategy. The input of product discovery is therefore an idea, typically one that has been evaluated. Do you agree?

Thanks Roman. It does…and FWIW i’m totally bought into the idea of cross-functional teams 100% + reducing handoff’s..but i’m wondering what you would consider to be the prerequisites for starting the discovery, other than just an idea? In my experience big organisations are not short of ideas but often fail to know how/where to start. So in your opinion where does discovery begin and how is it initiated? (Apologies realising my example may be a bit too nuanced for this comment thread!)

Hi Luke,

Thank you for sharing your question. My intention was to recommend assembling a cross-functional team in order to assess a business opportunity and investigate an idea. This team should consist of the person in charge of the (future) product, key stakeholders, and development team members, like a UX designer, developer, and tester. In the case of a brand-new product, the latter should become members of the team responsible for building the actual product.

To make this approach work, development organisations have to reserve capacity to support innovation/discovery initiatives; developers no longer just implement requirements but help test business ideas. I am not the first one to suggest such an approach btw. Marty Cagan, for instance, suggested in a video published in 2011 a similar setup. Note that the development team members don’t necessarily have to be involved full-time in the discovery work; part-time is often sufficient.

Having worked for and with a number of large entreprises, my personal experiences with the traditional approach of using a dedicated research group that assesses business opportunities and carries out technology development work has been poor. Even if the group understands the market needs and the capabilities of the development, marketing, and sales organisations, the resulting handoffs usually cause a loss of valuable knowledge. The integrated, cross-functional approach I sketch in the article tries to address these issues.

Does this help?