What is product discovery?
Product discovery is learning what to build before you build it.
It includes customer conversations, behavior research and cheap tests of an idea. The goal is to lower the cost of being wrong. A conversation costs an hour. A feature nobody needs costs a build and then stays in the codebase.
Discovery isn't market research, which asks whether a market exists. It asks what a specific group is struggling with in enough detail to guide a build.
Why it matters for product builders
Most wasted engineering work isn't badly built. It is well built for a problem nobody had.
What changes in AI-first products
Nothing about customer needs got faster. Discovery matters more because building is no longer the main constraint.