Product management in intralogistics has long been project-driven, often prioritising execution over long-term scalability. But to build better software products, a shift towards Product Discovery is essential. In this blog post, we explore why this approach matters, the challenges of moving from custom-built solutions to a structured discovery process, and how it has helped us improve our product roadmap and decision-making. This post kicks off a series on creating value through strong product management—written by Georg Held, Product Manager in the Software Team at arculus.
The Shift Toward Product Discovery
In the past, people often considered one of the product manager’s primary responsibilities as gathering requirements and engineering. While this is undeniably true, Marty Cagan brought more focus to it by introducing the term "discovery" in 2007. He described it as finding out what to build. In fact, he emphasised that finding the right solutions is harder than building them (see The Origin of Product Discovery | Silicon Valley Product Group).
And this is precisely what we at arculus have observed in software: in intralogistics, there is too much focus on execution. In an industry where a few experts design highly complex and customised systems, understanding the real problems of the market is difficult. In the past, project-based implementation addressed specific, individual challenges. Today however, speed, efficiency, and adaptability demand more than just custom solutions. Established product management with a stronger focus on market needs is essential to scale your business, serve a broader range of customers, and keep costs down.
Info: This article kicks off a series of posts on creating value through a strong product management focus. Stay tuned!
What is Product Discovery?
Because we draw from many different sources to define product scope, product discovery provides a strong framework for avoiding misguided development. Through continuous discovery, we test ideas against market problems, user needs, and business goals. Cycles of exploration, experimentation, and validation ensure the focus remains on promising concepts that users will appreciate. Therefore, the focus of product discovery is on “What”.
(Image generated by Gemini AI)
In future posts, we will explore these cycles further, for example, by using prototypes to assess user needs. Naturally this process isn’t always straightforward, as it lacks predictability. Regular decision points foster collaboration on how to move forward with an idea, helping to navigate uncertainty.
Ultimately it’s crucial to avoid wasting time on ineffective concepts. That’s why speed plays a key role in the early stages of exploration. Reducing effort on unviable ideas is essential, especially since teams should focus on delivering real value.
This is where product discovery comes in. It helps ensure teams move fast in the right direction and continue to innovate. For more details on addressing risks upfront, solving problems collaboratively, and focusing on outcomes (customer and business problems) vs. outputs (features), see Discovery vs. Documentation | Silicon Valley Product Group.
Product Discovery at arculus
At arculus, we describe product discovery as capturing market problems and finding specific user needs for our system. To capture these problems, we focus on:
- Industry & market pain points through trend reports, competitive analysis and insider insights;
- Customer requirements through early opportunity scanning;
- User experience along the product journey through target user interviews and end-to-end testing;
- Technical trends and the management of legacy architecture and technology.
All of these contribute as "insights", which lead to what we call a product idea. To develop these further, a team of product and technical experts explores solutions to the problems. Importantly we always keep the end user in mind. This enables a vertical perspective—crucial for the arculus system—which integrates both software and hardware. Too often we’ve seen these treated as entirely separate due to their technical nature, even though true functionality depends on seamless integration across all layers, from user interaction to underlying hardware.
The team creates concepts for an idea and supports them with whiteboard sketches or even clickable prototypes where useful. We then plan product increments to determine overall priorities. Based on this, we either opt out or continue planning and development. At this stage, our product departments have found what Marty Cagan calls the "right product”. In addition, there is a high level of transparency and collaboration among all stakeholders, a prerequisite for good, high-performing teams.
We use Jira Product Discovery to facilitate this process, leading to the arculus product roadmap. Although any other tool could also work, this one provides the flexibility needed to orchestrate all items efficiently and transparently. Nevertheless, the arculus product team has found that rigorous discipline is more important than perfect tools.
Lastly, once a product discovery is done, the necessary product increment (PI) planning will bring the idea to the Development teams. If you want to know more about the delivery at arculus (“How”), read our previous post about fast development here.
Dealing with Project Requirements
As mentioned earlier, product teams dealing with many intralogistics projects often encounter various individual customer requests. While this is usually the norm, timing these requests is critical for any product manager. Additionally, handling requirements on a deal-by-deal basis leads to uncoordinated concepts.
As arculus grew, this became a real challenge and prevented us from consistently delivering a marketable solution. In fact our teams were delivering projects but had little time to follow a sustainable product roadmap. As a result the product architecture and business case suffered, leading us to plan a new version of arculus Fleet Manager (read more about it here).
This was not only a technical decision but also a shift towards excellence in what we build. By applying product discovery as described above, we broke new ground in addressing individual needs. Some of the best practices we implemented are outlined below:
- Collaboration with the sales department(s): This allows the product team to understand potential product gaps in the pre-sales phase before an offer is made and provides enough lead time for thorough product discovery. While we may choose not to pursue some opportunities or fail to win them, the effort is worthwhile because it improves our overall understanding of the market.
- Strict focus on the problem: This applies especially to customer requirements typically described as "one-liners" in a project's requirements catalogue. Among other things, this means evangelising the relevant departments so that customer interactions start with the problem rather than the solution. As Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle suggested, arculus teams relentlessly ask “Why” to identify problems.
- Support project teams with product documentation and expertise: This helps the team understand the portfolio upfront and during specification negotiations with customers. This is also a potent tool for steering discussions toward existing features. We regularly learn that these features are both sufficient and appreciated.
- Housekeeping in product discovery to identify risks early:
- Process: We created a product discovery process to keep track of the product discovery backlog (currently over 150 ideas). This allows us to see the status of an idea throughout its evolution: from the initial stage (parking lot) through discovery, planning, and development. The development status is captured via links to the implementation item in each team’s backlog.
- In addition, each idea has fields to identify affected teams, customers, and even relevant business goals. It also considers time factors, such as when ideas should reach a product release and other milestones, ensuring that the roadmap reflects these priorities.
- Using the arculus product discovery template, we have structured the way we capture ideas to make them easily understandable for anyone.
Responding to all product ideas is typically challenging. That is why the recommendations above, along with strategic direction, e.g., in focus markets, help us make the right decisions. As a result, we constantly update the product roadmap. This also gives all product management stakeholders confidence in what the team delivers. In the end we are positive that we made the right decisions to make our customers happy.
Conclusions and What is Next?
By applying a thorough product discovery approach to product management, arculus has already taken huge steps toward building better software solutions. We gained coordination, structure, speed, and oversight in creating the roadmap. This led to making more informed decisions and as a result, a better product-market fit.
As product discovery is a constant process, it is important to keep evolving and improving it. Among other factors, increasing the product value remains a key focus. Hence, we constantly evaluate performance by using available data points and feedback circles to keep prioritising the right product ideas, ultimately creating value in the market. This will bring arculus' Product Management team closer to the famous “The Ultimate Guide of a Product Manager Day by-Day Activity” by Lucas Balbino.
Stay tuned for the next post of our Product Management Best Practices series!
