Product Discovery in Roadmaps: How to Track Discovery Activities and Drive Better Outcomes

How much of your team’s capacity is dedicated to product discovery? If you’re like most product organizations, you probably don’t know—and that’s a problem.

Product discovery is where the magic happens. It’s where teams validate assumptions, understand customer problems deeply, and break down ambitious business objectives into actionable key results. Yet most roadmapping tools treat discovery as invisible work, making it impossible to track, measure, or defend when stakeholders question why teams aren’t shipping faster.

This creates a dangerous dynamic. Without visibility into discovery work, teams face constant pressure to deliver features. Discovery gets squeezed, cut, or eliminated entirely. And when teams skip discovery, they build the wrong things—wasting far more time and resources than discovery ever would have consumed.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore why product discovery matters, how it connects to your OKR framework, and how modern roadmapping tools like RoadmapOne make discovery activities visible and measurable alongside delivery work.

What is Product Discovery?

Product discovery is the evidence-informed process of reducing uncertainty as you find problems worth solving and solutions worth building. As Marty Cagan from Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG) explains, discovery is about answering two fundamental questions: Are there real users who want this product? And can we design a solution that is valuable, usable, feasible, and viable?

The product invention process is fundamentally creative—it’s more art than science. This challenges the common industry practice of treating requirements and design as predictable, schedulable processes. Discovery requires space for experimentation, iteration, and learning.

Discovery vs. Delivery: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Product discovery means uncovering what creates value, whereas product delivery means producing what creates value. These aren’t sequential phases but continuous, overlapping activities that should happen in parallel.

SVPG emphasizes that each product team should perform both discovery and delivery continuously. Product managers and designers typically spend more time on discovery work, while engineers dedicate more effort to delivery—but everyone participates in both activities.

The biggest mistake organizations make is separating discovery from delivery into different teams or treating discovery as a phase that happens before delivery begins. This creates a waterfall effect, reduces team ownership, and undermines the innovation and empowerment that drive great products.

Why Product Discovery Matters More Than Ever

The cost of skipping discovery is staggering. A CBInsights study found that 35% of failed startups identified “no market need” as the top reason for failure. They built something nobody wanted—a problem that rigorous discovery would have caught early.

Many organizations unknowingly use their full engineering team as “a very, very expensive prototype,” Cagan notes. They ship features, wait for customer feedback, then iterate through two or three release cycles before achieving basic usability. This approach wastes resources and extends time-to-market unnecessarily.

The Discovery-to-Delivery Ratio

What’s the right balance between discovery and delivery? Teresa Torres and other product experts recommend a 75% discovery to 25% delivery split in terms of where teams invest their learning energy—inverting the typical corporate ratio that usually runs 90% delivery and 10% discovery.

For practical implementation, consider a product trio model where the PM, designer, and one engineer dedicate 80% of their time to discovery activities while the remaining team focuses 80% on delivery. Both groups maintain shared understanding of the problem space before building solutions.

In sprint planning, teams should allocate up to 10% of sprint capacity for backlog refinement and discovery sessions. Instead of starting planning meetings with “What are we going to build?”, start with “What is the most important thing we need to learn this sprint?”

This shift in focus helps teams de-risk assumptions and ensure discovery work gets the attention it deserves.

Discovery: The Critical Moment for Breaking Down Objectives into Key Results

One of the most powerful—yet underutilized—aspects of product discovery is its role in the OKR framework. Discovery is the natural workshop where teams break down business objectives into specific, measurable key results.

Leadership sets objectives that matter to the business—outcomes like “Increase customer retention from 65% to 75%” or “Reduce onboarding time by 40%.” But how teams achieve those objectives should be up to them. This is where the SVPG Product Model shines: leadership allocates objectives to teams, and empowered teams determine the key results they’ll achieve to deliver that objective.

The Product Manager’s Leadership Opportunity

Product discovery represents one of the most critical leadership moments for product managers. This is where PMs can truly demonstrate their value by:

Facilitating collaborative discovery workshops - Bringing together designers, engineers, and stakeholders to explore the problem space deeply before jumping to solutions.

Engaging the team with the opportunity - Great PMs don’t just hand down requirements. They paint a compelling picture of the customer problem, the market opportunity, and the business impact. They make the team care about solving this problem.

Guiding the breakdown from objectives to key results - PMs help teams identify which specific outcomes (key results) will genuinely move the needle on the broader objective. This requires deep market knowledge, customer empathy, and strategic thinking.

Building psychological safety for experimentation - Discovery only works when teams feel safe to explore, test assumptions, and discard bad ideas quickly. PMs create the environment where learning is valued over being right.

Connecting discovery insights to roadmap decisions - PMs translate what the team learns in discovery into informed roadmap prioritization, resource allocation, and stakeholder communication.

When product managers lead discovery effectively, teams don’t just execute—they engage. They understand why the work matters. They take ownership of the outcomes. They bring their best creative thinking to the problem.

How Product Discovery Activities Work

Effective product discovery isn’t a single event—it’s a continuous practice woven into how product teams operate. Modern discovery teams engage in several key activities week over week.

Customer Interviewing

Good discovery teams talk to customers constantly. Not quarterly. Not when launching a new initiative. Weekly. These aren’t sales calls or support calls—they’re structured conversations designed to understand customer problems, motivations, and workflows.

The product trio (PM, design lead, and tech lead) shares responsibility for customer interviewing. When engineers hear customer pain points directly, they bring better problem-solving to both discovery and delivery.

Assumption Testing

Every product idea rests on assumptions. Discovery is about making those assumptions explicit and testing them rapidly. The experiment success rate—how often your hypotheses prove correct—helps gauge whether teams accurately predict which concepts will resonate.

Teams should track cycle time: the number of days since the last idea was discarded. If teams aren’t throwing out ideas regularly, they’re probably not testing assumptions rigorously enough.

Opportunity Solution Trees

Popularized by Teresa Torres, Opportunity Solution Trees visually map the relationship between business goals, customer needs (opportunities), and potential solutions. They provide an excellent visual artifact for collecting, organizing, and prioritizing discovery work.

OSTs help discovery happen simultaneously alongside delivery by making discovery efforts tangible. They give teams and stakeholders a shared view of what’s being explored and why.

Rapid Prototyping and Testing

Get your key ideas into a prototype fast, and get your prototype in front of target customers early and often. Discovery prototypes don’t need to be production-ready code—they can be clickable mockups, landing pages, or even paper sketches.

The goal is to learn quickly and cheaply. The faster you can validate or invalidate an assumption, the less waste you create.

Making Discovery Visible in Your Roadmap

Here’s the challenge most teams face: if discovery work doesn’t appear on the roadmap, it effectively doesn’t exist in stakeholder conversations. Discovery becomes the first thing cut when delivery pressure mounts.

The solution is to make discovery work as visible and valued as delivery work.

Marking Allocations as Discovery Activities

RoadmapOne introduces a simple but powerful feature: the ability to mark specific squad allocations as “Discovery” activities. When you allocate an objective to a squad and sprint, you can toggle whether this allocation represents discovery work or delivery work.

The Edit Allocation modal in RoadmapOne allows you to mark allocations as Discovery activities, making this critical work visible on your roadmap.

This small toggle creates enormous clarity. Product managers can now:

• Plan discovery sprints explicitly - Allocate 1-2 sprints for discovery before committing to delivery timelines
• Balance discovery and delivery visually - See at a glance whether teams have appropriate discovery capacity
• Defend discovery time to stakeholders - Point to specific roadmap allocations that represent learning and validation work
• Track discovery across multiple objectives - Understand which initiatives are in discovery phase vs. delivery phase

How Discovery Appears in the Roadmap View

When an allocation is marked as discovery, it appears distinctly in the roadmap grid. Discovery activities are visually differentiated from delivery allocations, creating instant visibility into what each squad is working on.

Discovery activities appear clearly in the roadmap view, showing which squads are in learning mode vs. delivery mode for each sprint.

This visual distinction helps teams and stakeholders have more nuanced conversations:

• “Squad A is in discovery on the retention objective for the next two sprints, then they’ll move to delivery.”
• “We have three squads in discovery this quarter—that’s appropriate given we’re exploring new market segments.”
• “This objective has been in discovery for six sprints. What have we learned? Is it time to move to delivery or pivot?”

The roadmap becomes a tool for strategic conversation, not just feature tracking.

Tracking Discovery Capacity in Analytics

Visibility in the roadmap is just the beginning. RoadmapOne also includes discovery allocations in analytics, giving leadership quantitative insights into how teams allocate their capacity.

Discovery vs. Delivery Analytics

The analytics dashboard can now show:

Percentage of capacity dedicated to discovery - Across the entire organization, specific tribes, or individual squads. Is your organization investing 10% in discovery? 25%? 5%? Now you know.

Discovery capacity by quarter - Track how discovery investment changes over time. Are you frontloading discovery early in the planning year, then shifting to delivery? Or maintaining continuous discovery throughout?

Discovery allocation by objective type - Are teams doing more discovery on customer-facing objectives vs. internal efficiency objectives? This helps ensure discovery effort aligns with strategic priorities.

Squad-level discovery patterns - Some squads may need more discovery time due to higher uncertainty or newer problem spaces. Analytics help you spot outliers and have coaching conversations.

Measuring Discovery Effectiveness

Beyond tracking discovery capacity, teams should measure discovery outcomes:

Validated ideas per sprint - How many assumptions did the team test? How many ideas were validated vs. invalidated? A high invalidation rate isn’t failure—it’s efficient learning.

Cycle time between discovery activities - How many days since the last customer interview? Since the last assumption test? Work to reduce these intervals.

Time to first validation - When starting discovery on a new objective, how quickly does the team reach their first meaningful validation point? Faster is better.

Ideas discarded - Track how often solutions are thrown out. If teams never discard ideas, they’re probably not testing rigorously enough.

Progress toward desired outcomes - Ultimately, measure discovery by charting progress toward outcomes like engagement or conversion, quarter over quarter. Improving discovery practices should correlate with improved outcome velocity.

These metrics help teams manage discovery as a discipline, not just an art.

Balancing Discovery and Delivery Across Your Organization

Different teams and different objectives require different discovery-to-delivery ratios. Here’s how to think about appropriate balance.

When to Invest More in Discovery

Increase discovery allocation when:

Uncertainty is high - New markets, new customer segments, or novel problem spaces require extensive discovery before committing to delivery.

Stakes are high - Strategic bets that could define the company’s next three years deserve thorough discovery to reduce risk.

Past delivery failed - If teams shipped features that didn’t drive intended outcomes, it’s a signal to invest more in discovery upfront.

You’re exploring vs. executing - Innovation initiatives and new product lines need higher discovery ratios than incremental improvements to established products.

When to Invest More in Delivery

Shift toward delivery when:

The solution is well-validated - Discovery has produced clear insights, and the path forward is understood.

You’re scaling what works - Taking a validated solution to additional customer segments or markets is primarily a delivery challenge.

Technical debt is blocking progress - Sometimes teams know exactly what customers need, but infrastructure limitations prevent delivery. Focus on delivery work that unblocks future discovery.

Time-sensitive opportunities exist - Market windows, competitive pressures, or regulatory deadlines sometimes require bias toward delivery.

The key is making these decisions explicitly rather than defaulting to delivery because it feels more “productive.”

Common Product Discovery Mistakes to Avoid

Even teams committed to discovery often fall into predictable traps.

Doing Too Little—Or Too Much—Discovery

When teams don’t do enough discovery, they end up in what some call the “stupid zone”—building things nobody wants. But too much discovery wastes time in endless research without committing to solutions.

Use clear decision gates: What do we need to learn to commit to delivery? Once you’ve validated those key assumptions, move forward.

Leaving Validation Until the End

Many teams mistakenly believe validation comes at the end of the process. By then, you’ve already committed significant resources to a direction that may be fundamentally flawed.

Validate continuously. Test the riskiest assumptions first. Get comfortable discarding ideas early.

Conducting Research in Silos

When product, design, and engineering each conduct their own research in isolation, insights don’t integrate, and teams don’t build shared understanding.

Discovery must be collaborative. The product trio should participate together in customer interviews, prototype testing, and assumption validation.

Focusing Only on Pre-Launch Research

The biggest discovery mistake is treating it as a phase that happens once before launch, then stopping.

Effective product discovery is continuous. Customer needs evolve. Market conditions change. What worked last quarter might not work next quarter. Maintain regular customer touchpoints throughout the entire product lifecycle.

Confirmation Bias

Teams often unconsciously favor information that confirms their pre-existing beliefs while disregarding contradictory evidence.

Combat confirmation bias by actively seeking disconfirming evidence. Ask “What would need to be true for this idea to fail?” Test those conditions explicitly.

Best Practices for Effective Product Discovery

Based on SVPG’s frameworks and insights from leading product organizations, here are practices that consistently produce better discovery outcomes.

Integrate Discovery with Delivery

Don’t separate teams into discovery and delivery. Use the same cross-functional team for both. Everyone owns both the problem and the solution.

If you want discovery work included in each sprint, it must live in the same backlog as delivery work. Prioritize all work in one place, forcing conscious trade-offs between discovery and delivery.

Use Dual-Track Agile

Run discovery and delivery in parallel. While some team members are discovering what to build next, others are delivering previously validated solutions.

This keeps both activities moving continuously without the stop-start inefficiency of sequential phases.

Make Discovery Tangible

Use visual tools like Opportunity Solution Trees, story maps, and assumption boards. These artifacts make discovery work concrete, allowing teams and stakeholders to critique and collaborate effectively.

Include discovery stories in your sprint boards. Track them. Review them. Celebrate completed discovery work just as you celebrate shipped features.

Create Psychological Safety

Discovery only succeeds when teams feel safe to explore, fail, and learn. Product managers and leaders must actively create environments where:

• Questions are welcomed, not seen as challenges to authority
• Failed experiments are treated as valuable learning, not performance issues
• Teams can say “This isn’t working” without fear of blame
• Different perspectives and expertise are genuinely valued

Start with the Riskiest Assumptions

Don’t test easy assumptions first. Identify what would kill the idea if it’s false, then test that assumption immediately.

If the risky assumption proves false, you’ve saved enormous time and effort. If it proves true, you’ve gained confidence to proceed.

Measure Learning, Not Just Activity

It’s easy to count customer interviews conducted or prototypes created. But SVPG reminds us that what teams are really searching for are insights, not just learning.

Focus on what you learned and how it changes your strategy. Did this discovery activity move the team closer to a viable solution? Did it help break down the objective into clearer key results?

From Discovery to Delivery: Making the Transition

Discovery shouldn’t last forever. At some point, teams need to commit to delivery. How do you know when to make that transition?

Clear Decision Criteria

Establish upfront what needs to be validated before moving to delivery:

• Have we confirmed this problem matters to enough customers?
• Have we identified at least one solution approach that tests positively?
• Do we understand the technical feasibility and can estimate effort?
• Have we defined success metrics and can measure them?
• Does the expected value justify the expected investment?

When you can answer “yes” to these questions, you’re ready to shift from discovery to delivery.

Continuous Discovery During Delivery

Even after committing to delivery, continue discovery activities at a smaller scale. Keep talking to customers. Keep testing assumptions. Keep learning.

The best product teams never fully leave discovery mode—they just shift the ratio between discovery and delivery based on where they are in the product lifecycle.

Learning from Delivery

Delivery itself generates insights. How customers actually use features often surprises teams. Usage data, support tickets, and customer feedback during delivery should feed back into ongoing discovery.

This creates a continuous loop: Discovery informs delivery. Delivery validates discovery. New questions from delivery spark new discovery activities.

Conclusion: Making Discovery a Strategic Advantage

Product discovery isn’t overhead—it’s your competitive advantage. Teams that discover effectively build the right things. They waste less effort on features nobody wants. They achieve business objectives faster because they’re not burning sprints on false starts.

But discovery only works if it’s visible, valued, and measurable. When discovery activities live in the shadows—tracked in spreadsheets or not tracked at all—they become the first casualty of delivery pressure.

By making discovery visible in your roadmap and tracking discovery capacity in your analytics, you transform how your organization thinks about product work. Discovery becomes a first-class activity, not an afterthought. Product managers can defend discovery time with data. Leadership can see whether teams have appropriate discovery capacity for their level of uncertainty.

Most importantly, discovery becomes the strategic moment where product managers lead their teams in breaking down ambitious business objectives into specific, testable key results. It’s where teams engage with problems, get excited about opportunities, and take ownership of outcomes.

That’s not overhead. That’s how great products get built.

Ready to Make Discovery Visible?

References and Further Reading

• Marty Cagan, INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love
• Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits
• SVPG Articles on Product Discovery
• Jeff Gothelf, “Making Time for Product Discovery”
• Nielsen Norman Group, “Discovery in Agile”