Discovery Points

When you’re early in product discovery, there’s more noise than signal. Sometimes priorities jump out at you, but sometimes you need to step back and evaluate where you are before you move forward. You need to slow down to speed up.

This is the case with the new project I’m working on. There are many people involved in the discovery phase. We’re asking questions, researching, and sharing context freely. This can be great, but the information overload can also bog you down and prevent the right focus.

To help the team focus on the right things, I came up with a concept to help orient all the information we’re uncovering. I call this system Discovery Points, a set of five categories to group information in an effort to identify the highest leverage work we can do. This is a continual discovery process as each of these elements is identified.

1. Major Unknowns → What don’t we know that could change everything?
2. Critical Assumptions → What must be true for this to work?
3. Weak Links → What fragile elements are most likely to break?
4. Key Dependencies → What do we rely on that could fail or constrain us?
5. Leverage Points → Where can small actions drive big results?

I took this list and started adding a bunch of stickies to a FigJam board. I shared this with the team and we started talking about them, adding qualitative data (context) to the list. It not only helped frame our current understanding of the problem space, but it started to surface opportunities (the leverage points) where we can prioritize answering unknowns, validating assumptions, and identifying weaknesses in order to start delivering impactful work.

Let’s walk through each of these areas with clear examples, and then I’ll share how you can use these to drive your discovery process in the right direction. These five elements are also applicable to product work at any point in the lifecycle, whether you’re building new products or building features into an existing product.

Major Unknowns

Discovery work is the process of venturing into the unknown to make it known. You need to proactively seek out and stare down uncertainties, shining a light on every dark and ill-lit corner of the problem space. Bring the scary things into the light so you can better understand them.

The goal is to find the unknowns that, depending on the answer, will affect the course of action you proceed down. Those are the unknowns you need to focus on.

Some example unknowns:

• Demand: Will customers actually pay for this solution?
• Feasibility: Can we build this with our current technology stack?
• Behavior: How will users interact with this feature in real-world conditions?
• Resources: What level of team effort and infrastructure will this truly need?
• Competition: How might competitors react to our entry into this space?

The activity you will focus on in this area is research. Be an investigator, ask questions and seek out answers until the unknowns start to bend towards knowns.

Critical Assumptions

Humans are constantly making assumptions. We don’t like open loops, so our brains will work desperately to “fill in” the information. We do this in the form of assumptions. We leverage our past knowledge and prior experience to make an assumption, an educated guess. If you don’t know full well that you’re assumption is factually correct, you need to validate it.

The goal is to surface the critical assumptions that, like major unknowns, would alter the decisions you make based on their validity.

Some example assumptions:

• Market Need: Users are actively seeking solutions to this specific problem.
• Technical Capability: Our current tech stack can handle the expected scale.
• User Behavior: Users will adopt the new workflow without significant resistance.
• Revenue Model: The pricing structure will cover costs and generate profit.
• Integration: The new feature will work seamlessly with existing systems.

The activity you will focus on in this area is testing. If you have an assumption, you need to test it. Find the smallest way you can capture data necessary to validate or invalidate the assumption you’re making.

Weak Links

Weak links are the points of fragility. You may have answered a major unknown or validated a critical assumption, but by doing so you also highlight an area of weakness. This area requires a different approach in terms of testing and validation.

The goal is to the surface the weak links that require stress-testing to mitigate.

Some example weak links:

• System Performance: High-load scenarios could cause slowdowns or failures.
• Data Security: Potential vulnerabilities in data storage and transmission protocols.
• User Authentication: Single point of failure in the authentication process.
• Third-party Services: Over-reliance on external APIs that could become unstable.
• Error Handling: Edge cases that haven’t been accounted for in the design.

The activity you will focus on in this area is stress-testing. Find a way to simulate the load and put the weak link under stress. That’s how you’ll strengthen the weak part of the system. And sometimes this just means going through a thought exercise to play out the worst-case scenario of the identified weak link.

Key Dependencies

Most work contains relationships and dependencies between the parts of a system. Very few things occur in isolation. The key dependencies are the places where a reliance on a specific component introduces risk or a decrease in overall efficiency.

The goal is to surface key dependencies as areas to find replacements.

Some example key dependencies:

• Integrations: Critical business processes that rely on external services or APIs.
• Legacy Systems: Core functionality that depends on outdated technology or infra.
• Team Knowledge: Processes that only specific team members understand.
• Infrastructure: Services that require specific cloud providers or configurations.
• Data Sources: Features that depend on continuous access to specific data.

The activity you will focus on in this area is finding alternatives. Can we replace this dependency such that the system becomes more self-reliant and, therefore, more efficient, less brittle, and with higher adaptability?

Leverage Points

Even today there are considerable questions surrounding the construction of the pyramids in Ancient Egypt. How were a people without the advantage of modern technology and machinery able to construct such incredible structures?

Part of the answer: levers. These simple devices allowed the Egyptians to move and lift the heavy stones used to build the pyramids. Their abilities were multiplied, strength amplified, and results magnified through the use of levers.

The same applies in the discovery process. As we answer major unknowns, validate critical assumptions, stress-test weak links, and find alternatives to key dependencies, we surface leverage points. These points deliver an outsized impact.

The goal is to find small ways to make a big impact through leverage points.

Some example leverage points:

• Automated Testing: Implementing automated testing early can prevent countless future bugs and save significant development time.
• User Onboarding: A well-designed initial user experience can dramatically increase long-term user retention and engagement.
• API Design: Creating flexible, well-documented APIs early enables rapid feature development and third-party integrations.
• Performance Optimization: Small improvements in core system performance can yield massive benefits across the entire user base.
• Data Analytics: Strategic placement of analytics can provide invaluable insights for future product decisions with minimal implementation effort.

The activity you will focus on in this area is running small experiments. For each leverage point, put it to the test. Have a bias for action and learn by doing. That’s the only way you can measure the impact.

Drawing Relationships

For each of these points—major unknowns, critical assumptions, weak links, key dependencies, leverage points—you will invariably find direct relationships between them. One major unknown could be directly related to another; a critical assumption could be driven by a key dependency; a weak link could be resolved as a leverage point. This is natural, and it will surface priority areas for you to focus on. Don’t ignore the relationships—call them out and use them as added self-referring weight.

Taking this further, you can specifically identify the unknowns, assumptions, weaknesses, and dependencies related to each leverage point. For each step towards resolution, you further solidify and strengthen the priority of each leverage point.

Finding Leverage

The task of discovery is clear: Stay curious and keep asking questions to answer major unknowns, validate critical assumptions, strengthen weak links, remove key dependencies, and find the leverage points where the impact considerably outweighs the effort. Remove risks and increase efficiency until you have a small set of actions you can take to dramatically deliver an impact.

Without these key areas of discovery, my team felt lost amidst the depths of uncertainty. Discovery work is ridden with anxiety because of all the open loops. Remember how our brains crave closing the loops? Well that puts us in a state of perpetual imbalance. These areas give language and organization to a process full of unknowns and disorder. They bring a semblance of balance to an otherwise messy and unpredictable world.

Start small, stay curious, and unlock value.