The Discovery Gap Between What You Sell and How Customers Buy
Why Market-facing and Journey teams misalign and how to fix it.
I have previously discussed the difference between Market-facing Products (capital P) and Journey products (lowercase p). Market-facing products are what people buy; Journey products are the experiences of how people buy, use, manage, resolve, or stay. This distinction is especially true in non–tech‑first industries like telecom, banking, insurance, and retail, where the products people purchase and the systems they interact with often evolve separately, creating gaps the customer inevitably feels.
In many large enterprises set up with these two layers of the product ecosystem, the discovery failures that show up in the flows often have a simple root cause: the early Product framing didn’t fully account for the systems, constraints, behaviors, or cross‑functional dynamics required to make the experience work end‑to‑end. It’s not that Market Product teams always do thorough discovery — it’s that whatever discovery is done rarely connects deeply enough to the realities of how the experience actually performs in the wild.
Authentication, Buy flow, Cart, Checkout, Search, Chat, Troubleshooting, Account Management, Billing and Payments, Support. The places where customers actually decide, act, and get help.
These are the Journey products — the systems and journeys that carry the weight of the customer experience but rarely get treated like real product work.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth: This is one of the places where companies lose the customer. Because the systems are not built to support the Market-facing products. We treat launches of a Market Product as a project with a set timeline and funding. Once the Product launches, then it’s up to the Journey product teams to manage it.
Let’s talk about why that happens.
Market Product discovery misses the reality of the user journey
Market Product teams usually believe they’ve done discovery. Hopefully, they’ve talked to users. They’ve aligned on goals. They’ve run competitive analysis. They’ve built the business case.
But discovery isn’t a deck. Discovery is understanding how customers think, behave, hesitate, or churn. Discovery is understanding how people buy and why they will be in a relationship with the company.
Most Market-facing discovery misses the reality of the user journey. It assumes the flow is a happy path - straight line, frictionless, and obedient.
It isn’t. It never is.
The “hidden discovery” problem
Even when Market-facing teams do some legitimate discovery, they rarely share it proactively.
And the Journey teams, the ones who own the flows, platform, systems, and experiences where the sale happens, are left trying to stitch together the basics:
Why are we building this?
Who is the target?
How many people are expected to buy it?
What problem does it solve?
What outcome are we driving?
What does a good flow look like for this customer?
When none of this context is shared, two things happen: (i) teams make assumptions. (ii) Then they get blamed when the metrics don’t move.
Discovery that isn’t shared = no discovery at all.
Requirements are locked before the problem is understood
This is the pattern across many enterprises:
Market-facing builds the business case.
Leadership locks the scope, the budget, and the launch date.
Requirements are handed down already baked.
Journey product teams inherit them as features to build, not problems to solve.
Discovery is now impossible because everything is predetermined.
In this model, you’re not building a product. You’re implementing a decision.
The Journey product teams don’t get to ask: “Does this solve a real customer problem?”
No time for that. Just build it.
This is how product discovery dies before it even starts.
Journey product teams are treated like IT, not product
This is the cultural root of the entire issue.
Journey product teams — Digital, Account Management, Site Search, Chatbots, Buy flows — are treated as an execution feature factory that delivers; order takers that are the last stop, not the first partner.
But these teams sit closest to the customer’s actual behavior. They see the drop-offs, retries, failed logins, broken steps, and contradictory flows.
In a healthy product culture, Journey teams develop a strong grasp of constraints, edge cases, and downstream impacts. But in many enterprises, they’ve been conditioned as executors — so the muscles needed for true discovery never get built.
The enterprise workaround that makes everything worse
Because Market-facing teams don’t bring Journey teams in early, they bring in enterprise solution architects instead.
Architects do what they are supposed to do: map systems, interfaces, dependencies, and integrations.
But here’s the failure mode: They design the integration. The customer journey gets left behind.
The project becomes a diagram, not a product.
When no one designs the journey, the product meets the integration requirements instead of the customer requirements, and the experience underperforms accordingly.
Misaligned Objectives
There’s another failure most leaders don’t see clearly:
Market-facing teams rarely think about how the customer will be supported after the sale.
They define what the product is, how it will be sold, and at what price point. But not how it’s supported.
Most assume the customer will call or visit a store if anything breaks.
This assumption is deeply out of sync with:
Digital organizations trying to increase self-service
Contact centers trying to reduce volume. Enterprise cost models that cannot sustain endless human support.
Customer expectations shifting toward “I should be able to solve this myself”. A demographic that prefers digital-first, low-friction experiences
So the company ends up selling products with incomplete journeys. And the customer ends up paying the price - in time, frustration, and inconsistency.
Why Journey Product Strategy Needs to Exist
Journey products aren’t just delivery mechanisms. They are real products with their own constraints, user problems, and long‑term evolution. Yet most enterprises never articulate a Journey Product Strategy, leaving these teams reactive, dependent, and constantly context‑switching to support Market-facing launches.
A strong Journey Product Strategy clarifies:
The role of each Experience product in the ecosystem
The end-to-end user problems the team owns
The capabilities it must maintain and improve
The constraints it must work within
The metrics that define its health
The investments and bet areas for the next 12–18 months
Without this strategy, Journey teams become the organization’s fallback — responsible for making everything work, but rarely given the authority, clarity, or room to shape the future.
With a strategy in place, they become focused, equal partners. Not downstream executors, but owners of the experience layer, where customer trust is won or lost.
What Experience discovery actually looks like
The strength of Journey teams’ discovery skills depends on how they’ve been positioned, enabled, and involved over time. Some have become exceptionally strong because they work closest to real user signals; others haven’t had the opportunities, expectations, or support to develop the same depth.
Over time, they can understand:
User behavioral signals
How customers phrase their problems
Where friction accumulates in flows
What causes drop-offs, retries, and abandonment
The invisible rules and constraints of the ecosystem
The micro-decisions customers make along the way
What journeys must do to actually support the product
This is why discovery for flows is critical — and why it shouldn’t be done by people who never touch them.
The minimum viable fix: collaborate from day one
This is the simplest intervention with the highest return:
Market-facing and Journey teams must collaborate from the moment the problem is defined.
Even if the Experience side has only one strong IC PM, involve that person immediately.
They bring the constraints and the reality of the ecosystem.
They know what is possible, what is risky, and what will cause downstream pain.
Early collaboration prevents months of churn, misalignment, and rework.
It also creates better products.
How to transition
Here are three shifts that would materially improve how Market-facing and Journey teams work together:
Treat Journey teams as product partners, not IT executors.
Don’t lock requirements before you understand the user journey.
Validate the user problem before you design anything.
Market insight ≠ user insight.
Business goals ≠ customer needs.
Discovery ≠ stakeholder alignment.
Bottomline
Many enterprise product failures aren’t caused by engineering, design, or testing. They start much earlier — with unclear problem framing, siloed discovery, and misalignment between Market-facing and Journey product teams.
Fix that, and most things get easier: clearer experiences, higher conversion, lower support volume, faster delivery, fewer surprises, and teams that can do their best work — and customers who don’t have to navigate broken or inconsistent journeys.
This is what discovery for Journey products is actually about.
Not frameworks.
Not ceremonies.
Not templates.