Product Discovery is a vital process of developing technology, helping companies identify the right features, functionalities, and overall direction for their products. This process is especially critical in AI initiatives, where genuinely understanding user needs and technical feasibility before hopping into the AI wave is paramount.
Product Discovery involves a series of workshops and research phases aimed at aligning stakeholders, understanding the market, generating ideas, and assessing their viability.
For Fasten Health, a novel personal health record (PHR) solution, this process was essential to ensure their AI-driven product would meet user needs and stand out in a competitive market.
Introducing Fasten Health
Fasten Health is a groundbreaking PHR platform that simplifies and secures health data management. It allows users to sync their health data from multiple vendors to a centralized, user-friendly interface.
Fasten Health's vision is to provide a seamless, on-device AI assistant experience that helps users navigate and gain insights from their medical records while maintaining the highest data privacy standards.
Xmartlabs' Expertise in Product Discovery
At Xmartlabs, we have helped many early-stage startups and established companies conduct initial Product Discovery sessions or pivot their product strategies based on market-validated insights.
Our approach ensures that clients like Fasten gain a clear understanding of their product's direction based on the perception of value-yield and feasibility (the "Product Understanding" stage) and how to address user needs effectively with the right tech solutions (the "Solution Design & Validation" stage).
As a direct result of our Product Discovery experience spanning years and industries, we have refined a set of guiding principles and structure to navigate a process that can be very complex and overwhelming. We like to assess our customer's baseline (i.e., "current state") and define a set of key activities in a workshop format, a.k.a. "The Product Discovery Workshops," that will help us identify our product's opportunities.
The Product Discovery Workshops
Structuring distinctive workshops that focus on specific aspects of the discovery journey and that build on top of each other is the most effective and creative way to help everyone involved introspect and produce the best insights.
These workshops are usually tailored to the specific scenario a given idea, product, or service goes through. Still, in terms of "Product Understanding," workshops tend to align (roughly) with the following objectives:
- Foster alignment between all parties and around the product idea and its principles.
- Conduct deeper product research: understand the current and desired state and all possible influential factors.
- Ideate and brainstorm; assess value propositions.
- Outline the first version of your product, one that enables you to obtain validated learning (and hopefully, market fit)
- Assess the technical feasibility of the product we want to build
In Fasten Health's case, the Product Discovery workshops we conducted were as follows:
In the first workshop, we aimed to:
- Align the project’s vision and goals,
- Define the product's vision and goals
- Identify constraints
- Perform a RAID (Risks, Assumptions, Issues, Dependencies) analysis.
This workshop helped us understand Fasten Health’s objectives and constraints, setting a solid foundation for the subsequent workshops.
The second workshop involved market analysis and research. We:
- Reviewed existing product iterations and prototypes
- Explored product and technical specifics through SME (Subject Matter Expert) interviews
- Conducted competitive research and analysis.
This phase was crucial for gathering essential insights into the market landscape and identifying opportunities and challenges for Fasten Health.
In the third workshop, we:
- Brainstormed and formulated hypotheses
- Conducted personas analysis to understand end-users better
- Mapped user’s current journeys
- Defined success metrics and measurement strategies
This session generated innovative ideas and hypotheses to address user needs and mapped out the current user journeys to identify areas for improvement.
During the fourth and last workshop, we:
- Focused on assessing ideas' viability
- Brainstormed features that better represent the product's potential
- Scoped the project in detail
- Drafted future user journeys aligned with our hypotheses
This phase helped us evaluate the feasibility of proposed ideas and define a clear project scope, aligned with user needs and market demands.
Assessing a Product's Technical Feasibility
A vital exercise when conducting a Product Discovery is to gauge if the desired product that's been conceptualized is also feasible from a technological standpoint; can it be built with current technology constraints? Would it make sense financially? Etc.
The assessment of a product idea's technical feasibility can be approached in two ways:
- Incrementally, as part of or alongside the workshops
- As a separate phase after refining product definitions and ideas
The second approach allows for a somewhat refined initial product idea before evaluating feasibility.
For Fasten Health, our ML engineers conducted technical research and proof of concepts (PoCs) in parallel with our workshops to determine the feasibility of the AI-driven solution. Our team faced three main challenges:
- Ensuring good user experience (fast response times, relevant answers)
- Running large language models (LLMs) locally within device limitations
- Complying with regulatory requirements like HIPAA
The technical feasibility takeaways included:
- Identifying viable options for LLMs that can run locally on devices
- Developing strategies to mitigate security concerns with cloud-based models
- Confirming the solution's overall viability (with further experimentation)
Insights and Takeaways
From our Product Discovery process with Fasten Health, we gained several insights. First, we identified Fasten Health’s data privacy approach with a local AI assistant as a significant market differentiator. This approach ensures sensitive medical data remains on the user's device, addressing privacy concerns and complying with strict healthcare data regulations.
Additionally, Fasten Health's ability to facilitate data synchronization from multiple healthcare providers offers users a comprehensive view of their medical history. This centralization transforms Fasten Health into a one-stop shop for all medical data needs, potentially reducing the complexity and fragmentation often experienced in managing healthcare information. Combining local AI and centralized data could significantly enhance the user experience by providing quick, personalized insights without compromising data privacy.
How Xmartlabs can help
We specialize in helping companies like Fasten Health grasp their product’s potential by deeply understanding customer needs. Our Product Discovery workshops ensure that we align on vision, explore creative ideas, and validate the technical feasibility of solutions. By partnering with us, companies can confidently navigate the complexities of AI product development, ensuring their products are both innovative and market-ready.
Don't hesitate to reach out if you feel we might fit your needs!
