40+ Fundamental Product Discovery Questions Founders Should Answer

It could be really tempting to want to start coding without even a one-day delay. But there are many questions to ask when launching a new product. In fact, the more preparation work you do prior to starting development, the smoother and more organized your processes will be. Otherwise, the project can become a never-ending mess that keeps on draining investment. No founder or product team wants that, right?

Essentially, you have to do the groundwork in advance, gather data, and get various people on board to determine what to build and how. Asking the right questions and finding answers to them can provide the necessary clarity and a foundation for the project. This will let the whole team move in the right direction without unwanted do-overs, budget overruns, and wasted time. On this page, we'll share the most important discovery session questions to consider.

What Are Discovery Questions? 

Product discovery questions are designed to guide teams as they validate product ideas and plan their development. Answers to them allow you to uncover insights and guide decision-making, from user pain points and market trend assessment to technical constraints and resource allocation.

Such questions help product owners, founders, and teams make decisions based on facts instead of guesswork. Research and finding answers is effort-intensive and typically tough, however, it reduces the chances of wasting resources and time on building something useless. You get to uncover details unknown before about your target audience, the competitive landscape, and the market, letting you clarify objectives and make realistic conclusions about the feasibility of your initiative.

Various people should have a say during such meetings, including designers, developers, product managers, and so on. It's a collaborative effort, and they can share their professional experience and ideas on how to approach product development or enhancement better.

When should you ask discovery questions? This could be an ongoing process as you can continuously refine your solution at various stages of the product development life cycle. But usually, the majority of questions are asked before development begins.

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Types of Product Discovery Questions

Like any questionnaire, your product development questionnaire could feature open-ended or close-ended questions. What ask can regard specific areas of the product. For instance, your questions could be:

• user-centric and revolve around spotting the user pain points, needs, and preferences;
• aimed at finding out as much as you can about the market and competitors;
• about the product's value proposition, stand-out features, and uniqueness;
• sales, pricing, and marketing-related;
• about the company's resources, possible deadlines, and the technical side of the development process.

Either way, the questions are aimed at gathering comprehensive insights, enhancing decision-making, making a plan, shaping the rules, and getting everyone involved in the product's creation on the same page.

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What should you ask if you plan on starting a development project? And what are good discovery questions not to miss?

Importantly, we won't suggest question samples to ask customers during an interview. Instead, we'll focus on the business and product-related matters that founders and product teams have to think through when considering development project initiation. We've broken down the questions into categories and split them into stages. It's okay if you won't be able to find answers to some of the questions quickly, as many of them require in-depth research and detailed planning.

Early-Stage Discovery Question Examples

The earliest questions should come up after ideation during the proof of concept stage. In essence, you have to find out whether the problem you aim to tackle really exists and is worth your time and money. You might discover that building a product isn't necessary, but as heartbreaking as this could be, it's much better to learn this now than find it out after you've spent thousands of dollars on a useless launch. Here are sample questions to ask about a new product when you're just getting started.

User-Related Questions

• Who is your target audience? — Define the primary users of the product, including their demographics and other crucial information. This can help you segment the audience, choose your tone of voice, design solutions, marketing channels, and other decisions.

• What are their pain points? — Describe what challenges they have that must be solved and why this problem exists. You need to identify which needs aren't met to formulate the product problem statement.

• How do people solve the problem now? — Note how they are coping with the issue in focus, what they're currently struggling with, and which compromises they have to cope with. This can help you spot gaps that'll become your product's strength.

Competitor-Related Questions

• Who are your competitors? — While you do competitive landscape analysis, list both direct competitors with analogous solutions and indirect ones with partially similar products.

• What are their strengths and weaknesses? — Examine the offerings of your competitors from different perspectives: value proposition, design, pricing, messaging, channels of communication with users, feature availability, workflow, and so on.

• What feedback have users given about similar products? — Browse the opinions that people share not on the competitors' websites and mark what they complain about and the aspects they enjoy.

Market-Related Questions

• What are the current market trends? — As you conduct market research, try to collect information about the existing and emerging industry trends, news, and vitals to evaluate the current state (e.g., rises, declines, or how it's evolving).

• What is your potential total addressable market? — Try to estimate the market size realistically for your product and find out how many people have the problem and will be willing to use and/or purchase your product.

Product Value-Related Questions

• How will your product solve the user problem? — Describe what the product should do and how it'll address the users' needs and pain points and make their lives easier.

• What unique value will your product offer? — Mark what makes the product stand out, its value proposition, unique selling points, differentiating features, benefits, why people should give it a try, and then continue using it in the long run.

• What are the primary goals of the project? — Indicate the objectives of the project clearly, ensuring that the aims are specific.

Additional Questions

• What did you do to prove your hypotheses? — The early stage is all about validating the feasibility of your idea, note what you've done to test your product hypotheses like running user surveys, conducting interviews, setting up a landing page and collecting the data of potential users in a waitlist, and so on.

• Is there a real interest in your product idea? — Note the most important results you have up to now, combining your findings from research and potential users.

• Why are you positive that the time is now? — Describe what makes you sure that now is the right time to initiate the project and why you're certain that if you bring the product to life it last longer than a year.

Pre-Development Examples of Discovery Questions

If the answers from the previous stage are convincing enough that the product is worth initiating, you should move on to the harder part of discovery. Now, you'll have to define what you should build and how you should build it most effectively in terms of resources. As a rule, most start off by building an MVP. A minimum viable product is a shrunken version of the future product, featuring the core functionality and the essentials. If its launch shows enough traction and potential, the product could then be enhanced with extra features and fancy add-ons.

Product Core-Related Questions

• Which features are integral to the product? — Handling feature prioritization is crucial since it influences the required resources. Select the most important features to form the backbone of the product, ensuring they are essential now for delivering value.

• What can be left for later post-release development stages? — As you form the MVP scope, leave out all of the features and extras that don't directly fit into the product's core, all the nice-to-have functionality should be left out-of-scope for future iterations. These are good discovery questions that'll provide a framework for development.

Design-Related Questions

• What are your main UX discovery findings? — Going through detailed UX discovery should let you make better design choices so you don't end up building another standard product that's no different from the hundreds out there.

• Did you ensure utmost usability from the start? — Spending time on creating wireframes lets you smooth out usability crumples and make navigation seamless, omitting illogical layouts, unnecessary steps, clicks, and elements.

• Are the prototypes created and well-tested? — Building a clickable model of the product is a huge step to envisioning what the product will be like once the mockups are developed and it's in the users' hands. Thoroughly testing the created product prototypes lets you spot UX/UI design inconsistencies and improve not only the look, but the user journey as well.

Technology-Related Questions

• Do you have a product specification? — Ideally, you should have a documented description of the product from various angles.

• Which tech stack did you select and why? — Give a detailed description of the technology stack the product will be based on, preferably explaining why these technologies made the cut and are optimal for your team.

• What system requirements apply to the product? — Put together specifications, noting which hardware and software are necessary for smooth performance, including RAM, bandwidth, storage capacity, and other points.

• Which parts of the product should be custom-built? — Virtually, it makes sense to custom develop only the unique features of the product and cut corners with existing APIs and integrations.

• Which integrations are necessary? — Think through your plan regarding third-party app integration, as many non-unique parts of your product could be created this way to save time and not reinvent the wheel, for example, user login or a payment method, and mind compatibility in advance.

• Which technical constraints should you consider? — Ask yourself what can lead the project to a deadlock or be a big bottleneck. For example, if you initially decide to build the MVP with no code, you'll most likely hit a wall and will have to start over and rebuild the whole thing more natively after some time.

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Time and Resource-Related Questions

• How many people are needed for the project? — Evaluate the workforce that's required for building the product, most likely you'll need a project manager, a designer, several developers, a quality assurance engineer, and marketing specialist, but the team structure and composition could vary based on the project's size and complexity. Also, decide whether you need people involved full-time or part-time.

• How are these people going to be hired? — You can hire people in-house, yet if you aren't sure that the project is going to be long-lasting and you don't have the people available to work on the project now, you may consider outsourcing MVP development as this can give you access to an assembled and experienced team very quickly, you fill skill gaps, and scaling the team up and down from the vendor's talent pool is easy.

• What is the estimated timeline for development? — Craft a realistic MVP roadmap that marks major milestones and indicates deadlines and deliverables for each chunk of the timeline, as well as the launch date.

• What resources do we need to bring this product to life? — Calculate the budget, counting in the MVP cost based on the salaries, estimated project duration, fees and payments for tools and third-party services, infrastructure costs, ongoing expenses, and a reserve supply for unexpected things.

Other Questions

• Which tools will the team need? — You can also decide early on what your team will use for communication, project management, progress tracking, and other tools.

• What can show the product's success? — Select tangible metrics you'll use to measure the product or MVP success, these could be performance metrics, quantifiable results and benchmarks, customer feedback, and markers that show traction.

• How will we measure the product's success? — Make up your mind regarding how you'll collect data and track performance, for example, you can link up Mixpanel or Amplitude for your product's analytics.

• What are the possible non-technical roadblocks the project can face? — Mark the potential obstacles that may prevent you from proceeding according to the plan. If there are challenges that can be addressed, like resource limitations or a competitor releasing something similar, put down how you'll mitigate or overcome them in case they occur.

• Which legal matters should be taken care of? — Most likely, there are laws, rules, and regulations that you'll have to adhere to, put down the essentials and possible constraints.

• Which pricing strategy should be chosen? — Do your research to make sure your asking price will be affordable for your target audience and yet be profitable enough for the business. Consider offering various plans in your pricing strategy or allow free trials to attract people and let them "test-drive" your product.

• Which sales and marketing initiatives are foremost? — Ask some discovery questions for marketing that'll let you make up your mind on the tactics, channels, marketing strategy, and activities that have to be handled during product development in preparation for the release.

Post-Development Discovery Questions Examples

There are still going to be many unknowns once you've launched an MVP. This is why data collection, as well as feedback and customer behavior analysis are integral at this point. It may turn out that many of your hypotheses are proven wrong and you'll have to iterate and make pivots. Here's a compilation of questions to ask about a product once it's released.

• Is the product performing as expected? — Revise the technical performance to spot any post-MVP bugs that could come up after release. Likewise, study the heatmaps, clickmaps, and other indicators showing whether users are able to complete the key tasks that you expected them to.

• Is anything performing not the way you expected? — It's absolutely normal to discover that people are using your product differently than you thought, perhaps, they enjoy a part of your product that you didn't put so much emphasis on from the start, collect such insights and act on them, as you might need to restrategize.

• What feedback do early adopters and users give? — Find out whether people are satisfied with your offering by asking discovery questions for customer success, collecting reviews, poll results, and holding interviews. If they report issues or inefficiencies, note them.

• What do collected metrics and data indicate? — Taking a deep dive into the performance metrics and other indicators can provide lots of insights, for instance, how well you've chosen your channels of communication, whether your sales tactics are working, or at what point of the funnel people bounce.

• Should anything be changed at the moment? — Summarize your key findings into categories and sort the issues, improvements, features, or changes that must be taken care of next, prioritization can help the sprints go smoother.

• What is the post-release long-term vision for your product? — Give thought to how you want the product to evolve, you might have plenty of ideas in stock that weren't taken care of for the initial release, so now you could decide what to do next in consequent iterations.

• Should the features in the backlog be brought to life? — Browse what you set aside for later and reevaluate the priorities of features, extra functionality, and add-ons you had in mind, correlating your hypotheses with the collected data from early users.

Concluding Thoughts on Discovery Meeting Questions

There, now you have plenty of discovery questions examples. You can modify them to better suit your project, extending the list to your liking.

Knowing which questions to ask during product discovery is one part of the deal, yet finding answers to them requires a lot more effort. If you find yourself overwhelmed by empty gaps and struggling with some of the questions, you are welcome to turn to Upsilon for discovery phase services.

In just two weeks, our experts can help make a blueprint for your project. We'll provide answers to the toughest questions regarding how to build the product in terms of tech, which integrations, programming languages, databases, and infrastructure to select, falling back on the years of experience developing MVPs successfully. So if you want to free yourself from these headaches and need assistance, feel free to contact us, we'll be glad to help plan and build your product!