Most discovery advice doesn’t survive real-world product building
The Gap Between Theory and Reality
Product design courses teach students to spend significant time on discovery, emphasising practices like user interviews, persona building, and behaviour studies. That’s all good in theory, but the reality is, unless you’re at one of the few organisations with tons of resources, there’s often little to no scope for such elaborate discovery.
How 'Most' Real-World Product Development Works
Most product development actually runs on the research, instinct, and the experience of the person (or group of people) driving the product. Once built, it’s validated by real users. Great product leaders have strong instincts, know how to make useful assumptions, and can identify people who help fill in the gaps (and more importantly, tweak those assumptions rapidly when needed).
There are a lot of “in-betweens” too, but many end up being pretend work—weeks of discovery that could’ve been replaced by what Chatgpt can produce in an hour.
Discovery Is Important, But Not Always How It's Taught
That’s not to say discovery isn’t necessary. It just means there are other ways to do it than waiting for user interviews. One of them is the monolithic approach, where one person or a group of business owners drives discovery using everything they’ve got.
Sadly, many designers trained in formal design courses don’t see this. They keep looking for “users” when there is no solution or business yet. They spend days defining the “right persona” when they could’ve just created multiple experiences for different personas instead. Many dismiss anything outside the structured process as “not real product practice”, forgetting that a lot of great products were built exactly this way.
And of course, this applies to product owners and other related roles just as much as it does to designers.
Instead of building the instinct to leap ahead with meaningful assumptions, they get tied to a process that only works in privileged setups.
Over the past year, I’ve taken more than 50 design interviews. Again and again, I saw candidates who couldn’t answer without a framework, couldn’t make a call by instinct when needed.
What they didn’t realise is, this ability to leapfrog understanding and land closer to the point is what real experience looks like. Not a certificate. Not the number of years you’ve been around.