Product discovery is the practice of validating problems, opportunities, and solutions with customers and data before committing engineering effort to build them. It is distinguished from product delivery (the act of designing, building, and shipping) and aimed at killing bad ideas cheaply so the team only builds things likely to drive the intended outcome. It is the front half of modern product work, and the part most under-invested in by startups that mistake speed of shipping for speed of learning.
The discipline was popularized in its modern form by Marty Cagan, especially in Inspired (2008/2017) and Empowered (2020), with the core argument that great product teams discover what to build before they decide to build it,...