Certified Product Discovery Expert

Who this is for

• You decide what goes into the product plan

  And you have to defend the decision to whoever asked for something else, with the argument for why the available evidence is enough, or is not.

• You have done discovery and watched it fail

  The research confirmed the problem, the team built, and nobody used it. Evidence about the problem was never evidence about the solution.

• You want a credential that is not about a tool

  PMCert is vendor-neutral: what is verified here holds at any company, with any research software.

What you take with you

• A permanent verification code

  Anyone confirms your credential at pmcert.org/verify, without having to ask you for anything.

• Approval that does not expire

  A credential you earned does not lapse, asks for no annual renewal and charges no subscription.

• LinkedIn and a public profile

  Add it to your licenses and certifications section, or share the link to your profile.

• A certificate with your score by domain

  In PDF, showing how you performed in each area assessed.

See what the questions are like

Two questions from the free open assessment. The certification exam uses different ones in the same format: a work situation and a decision.

1. In a review meeting, an important customer asks for a button to export the order list to a spreadsheet. The team records the request in the backlog with the literal wording received and classifies it as a customer requirement.

   1. ABuild the button, because the request came from an important customer and the implementation is simple
   2. BInvestigate what the customer does after exporting, because the request describes a solution
   3. CRefuse the request, because product decisions should not start from customer requests
   4. DPut the request to the other customers in a vote, to measure demand for the same button
   Show answer and explanation

   Answer: B

   What arrived was not a problem: it was a solution the customer formulated out of the tools they know. The information that matters sits one layer below, in what happens after the export. If the customer exports to calculate an indicator the product does not offer, the right answer is the indicator. If they export to send it to someone with no access to the system, the answer is sharing. If they export to check a number they do not trust, the answer is the reliability of the data, and the button would merely make the distrust cheaper to act on. Building it straight away is attractive because the request is specific, cheap and comes from whoever pays, which gives the sense of an easy, well-founded decision. Refusing on principle is attractive because it sounds disciplined, and it errs by discarding the only signal available: the request is a legitimate clue, it just is not the destination. Putting it to a vote is attractive because it seems to scale the evidence, and it only measures how many people recognise a familiar solution, telling you nothing about the problem behind it. Investigating the subsequent use costs one conversation and frequently reveals that the correct solution is not the one requested.

2. The team’s hypothesis is that managers abandon the monthly report because of the excess of fields on screen. The research plan calls for interviewing ten managers selected among those who have already filed a complaint about that same report.

   1. AThe plan is adequate, because it seeks exactly the people who live the problem described in the hypothesis
   2. BThe plan is adequate provided the script avoids mentioning fields before the interviewee does
   3. CThe plan can only find confirmation, and needs to include people who use the report without complaining
   4. DThe plan needs more interviews, because ten people do not support a conclusion of this kind
   Show answer and explanation

   Answer: C

   The design guarantees the result before the first conversation. Selecting only those who complained about the report ensures the topic comes up, and no possible configuration of those ten interviews would produce evidence against the hypothesis. An informative investigation needs a route by which the hypothesis can fall, and here that route is closed by the selection itself. Including people who use the report without complaining opens two decisive possibilities: discovering that those people also face the fields and still complete the task, which shifts the cause of abandonment, or discovering that they use a different route, which changes the problem. Taking care with the script is attractive because it is correct practice and avoids leading the answer, and it does not fix the selection: an impeccable script applied to a sample containing only dissatisfied people still produces only dissatisfaction. Increasing the number is attractive because more data always seems better, and it merely multiplies the same partiality, with the aggravating effect of raising the team’s confidence. Confirming that the people live the problem is attractive because it looks like focus, and it is precisely what removes the chance of learning anything.

• User interview questions generatorChoose the goal, the topic and the duration and get a ready script with no leading questions.Open
• Hypothesis generatorFrom observation to a sentence a test can confirm or knock down, with metric, number and timeframe.Open
• Jobs to be done canvasDescribe the progress the customer wants to make and what pushes, pulls or holds back a switch.Open
• Opportunity solution treeConnect the outcome the team is pursuing to customer needs, to solutions and to the tests that will decide between them.Open