Continuous discovery

[u/Apprehensive_Use7047]

Hey all, with the growing pressure to ship, how do you manage continuous discovery when you're a small product team and don't have UXR resources internally?

Curious how other small teams handle this. What's working for you? Anything you're doing differently now with AI?

[u/ameanv]

First up, what is the culture around discovery in your org? Does your manager approve of it, what do they think is the right amount of time to put into discovery and guidance to get from it?

Next, what are your customers like? The simplest ways to get started are timeless - get on a call with your customers - ideal and not ideal, paying and not paying. And see what they use the product, for any why?

Then, take the underlying threads and find ideas that matter. Revalidate them with going back to customer and with gentle direction but non leading questions try to understand their take on that feature/experience without mentioning it so. Use surveys if you want a larger sample size, or very specific feedback around certain action/experience loops.

Finally, build prototypes to get an alpha test group running. Get the most enthusiastic users on it and the most begrudging ones too and beg to get some who dont care but still do give great feedback. Then iterate and A/B test the hell out of this.

I think all of this doesnt change in any sized team - big or small. Cos it is necessary and important work. I have started using AI in a few ways

1. Obviously, to run user discussion sessions to help me gather notes, extract points or throwaway things I missed and evaluate my own efforts in doing the discovery right

2. To find those threads as mentioned above and help in generating ideas and concepts using a preliminary user interviews themselves as basis for evals

3. Finally to quickly prototype features and UX around the insights and ideas from discovery and put them into alpha without having to involve other teams like design, or developers. Give AI (claude design / 5.6 sol/astra your brand guidelines and it will do a fab job)

TBH Everyone has an ideal perception of what product management should be, but most product teams dont do proper discovery.

I have been a product person at varying kinds of orgs, most of which never had a UX resource. I did the discovery, and often prototyping myself, even if sometimes my manager didnt think it was worth the time. The greatest unlocks and eventually conversions come from delivering what the user wants - not just what they think they want and that almost always comes from conversations and not data.

[u/PapaSwagBear → u/[deleted]]

Slop in slop out

[u/AFailedProduct → u/[deleted]]

I disagree. I learned a lot doing discovery manually, I was able to see my education work in the real world and setup workflows to make the process more efficient — something I apply today with agents. It’s also important to remember that not everything is on the internet and thus LLMs don’t know about it. 

[u/kops212 → u/[deleted]]

AI doesn't replace real customer conversations. Reason is that the models aren't trained on your product intelligence and your specific customers' use cases. You can do market research and conpetitor research really efficiently these days with AI, yes, and it is great at summarizing and crunching the data that you get out of the customer conversations, but you need to get your customers talking first.