Product discovery

Status: Draft. Not yet verified in a documented practical example.

Input: a product idea, audience, known evidence and constraints. Use product-manager-thinking for the broader decision framing rather than repeating it. Never invent interviews, demand, market statistics or customer quotations.

Procedure

1. Frame. State the purpose, user problem, audience and current workaround. Mark each as fact, assumption or unknown. Describe the primary journey and provisional personas without personal records.
2. Compare. Include doing nothing and manual work alongside direct and indirect competitors. Record public source, date, capability, audience and limitations. Distinguish a vendor claim from independent evidence.
3. Hypothesize. Define the proposed value and why a user would switch. Separate interest, repeated use and willingness to pay. List the riskiest assumptions first.
4. Validate. Propose the cheapest ethical experiment that could disprove each assumption: a prototype walkthrough, consent-based discovery session or clearly described demand test. Specify audience, observation, success and stop thresholds, owner and time window. Thresholds are proposed until approved; no outreach, tracking or experiment execution is implied.
5. Bound. Recommend an MVP, exclusions and future opportunities conditional on the evidence. Define the outcome measure, baseline if available, target and next decision. Stop or pivot when the experiment contradicts the premise.

Output

Return a short opportunity brief and this evidence table:

Claim	Evidence and date	Confidence / limitation	Next experiment	Decision owner
A task capture flow saves effort	Synthetic hypothesis, no research run	Unknown	Compare prototype with current workaround	Product owner

Only public or synthetic material belongs in Construct. Research consent, recruitment and any spending require separate approval. Hand viability to business-owner, prioritized requirements to product-manager, and experience validation to ux-designer.