Product Discovery

This skill turns a fuzzy idea into a sharp, buildable MVP. It is inspired by Design Sprint and Lean Startup, and it resists the urge to jump to features before the problem is understood.

Analogy: do not prescribe medicine before diagnosing the illness. Most failed products are perfectly built cures for a disease nobody has.

Workflow

PHASE 1 — Understand the problem (not the solution)

Force the conversation onto the problem first. Ask:

• What specific problem are you solving?
• Who has that problem? Describe that person concretely.
• How do they solve it today? (even if it is Excel, WhatsApp, or by hand)
• Why is that current solution not good enough?

Do not let the discussion drift to features yet. If the user describes a solution, redirect to the problem it serves.

PHASE 2 — Validate the market

• Do you (or your target users) already pay for something similar? How much?
• Do you know other people with this same problem?
• Do you have access to potential customers to validate with?

The goal is evidence that the problem is real and painful enough that someone will pay.

PHASE 3 — Define the MVP

• What is the minimum result that would make someone pay?
• Which features are "nice to have" but not essential?
• How soon do you want something to show?

The MVP is the smallest thing that delivers the core result — not a small version of the full vision.

PHASE 4 — Output

Deliver these five items:

1. Problem definition — in one sentence.
2. Ideal customer avatar — who they are, concretely.
3. MVP scope — a prioritized feature list:
   • P0 — must exist for the MVP to deliver its core result.
   • P1 — important, but can wait for v1.1.
   • P2 — nice to have; explicitly deferred.
4. Success metric — how we will know it worked (e.g. "10 paying users in 30 days," "40% of signups complete the core action").
5. Concrete next step — the single next action to take.

Handoff

Once the MVP is defined, hand off to architecture-primer to decide how to build it, then ui-design to build the interface. Discovery answers (scale expectations, user type, timeline) feed directly into the architecture discovery phase — pass them along.