Why people are salty about Product Discovery

You might have spotted a bit of the shade being thrown in Teresa Torres' / Product Discovery's direction on LinkedIn over the last week.

I'm not going to wade into those murky waters on LinkedIn (for now), but feels like fair game in our little community!

If you're out of the loop - the main criticism is that Product Discovery is too focused on moving fast to reduce risk - instead of more typical UX/CX research where you take time to draw conclusions and discover the truth. It's basically a discussion on the 'depth' of the research.

This is a fairly common criticism of Product Discovery as an approach, and unsurprisingly it's usually coming from UX Design & Researcher (who might be more than a little biased).

I'm not going to get into the pros and cons of each approach, because it's not a case of which is better and worse.

Instead, I'm going to talk about the reason people are salty about Product Discovery - Perceived Value.

The perceived value of 'typical' UX research is low. It's seen as time consuming, it doesn't fit comfortably into most product development cycle, and generally the outcomes of research don't give clear direction to the team.

When teams are calculating if the time spent is worth the results they'll get, more often than not they'll choose to simply skip UX research to save time.

Across my 12 years as a UX Designer this was ALWAYS the challenge when it came to getting research into the process, and it is still a major challenge in design teams today.

Product Discovery on the other hand is a response to the perceived value of UX Research. It's leaner, more accessible, more collaborative and has a clear purpose of driving business and product outcomes in a customer centric way.

The reason people are salty about Product Discovery taking off is simple, it's because it challenges their notion of what is valuable, and it's being adopted much more quickly than UX research ever was.

I say all this as someone who's spun up multiple research labs over the years, done thousands of usability tests, run dozen of Design Sprints, and has always been a strong advocate for more research in Product.

It's not that UX Research is not valuable, it can be incredibly valuable if done well - but it doesn't matter if for the majority of stakeholders, the perceived value just isn't there.

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