The discovery phase is a crucial step in project development that focuses on identifying the target audience, their problems, and needs. By testing your idea against reality and collecting data, you can fine-tune your product to match user expectations. This data-driven approach is essential for creating an efficient and successful end product.
The discovery phase of a software, web, app or tech project is crucial for any client-agency-relation. It helps to formulate the idea behind the project of all stakeholders and you find product-market fit and save costs. The discovery phase provides several benefits, including:
- Understanding, formulating and consolidating ideas, problems and challenges.
- Clearly identifying the scope and goals of the project.
- Establishing business objectives based on data and research.
- Making design decisions based on data, rather than assumptions.
- Setting a clear direction for the product.
- Designing a market-driven prototype to get real user feedback in a test scenario.
- Creating a satisfying user-centric experience trough understanding pain points and solving them into benefits and value-adding features.
- Ensuring a higher return on investment for the project.
- Avoiding costly changes during the later stages of development.
- Involving in-house specialists early in the process to maximize their expertise and understanding of the problem to be solved.
Skipping the discovery phase when starting a project can lead to the same failures even major brands have made, such as Google: remember Google Glasses? Financial issues are also a main reason why project do not deliver the desired results. Utilizing Discovery can assist in establishing direction and shaping outcomes far before you enter the product development phase, so that a clear scope and product roadmap with deadlines can be established, which helps to orientate from the very first beginning, avoid blindspots, missed deadlines and reduce overall failure.
Skipping the discovery phase can result in the following:
- Never-ending scope creep: Lack of measurable expected results can cause constant extensions, which delay project completion.
- Increasing costs: Blurred goals and requirements generate changes in direction, leading to further associated cost increases.
- Missed deadlines: Without precise project boundaries, the development timeline can easily stretch out, postponing launch.
- Project not meeting your expectations: Misunderstandings at the initial stage of cooperation can lead to further confusion, wasting both time and money. Or a less mature product you expected.
The Discovery team may vary depending on the project, but there are some key members who manage the entire discovery phase of a project. Ideally, the whole team stays involved in the project management discovery phase. However, in reality, there could be situations where the project manager combines the two roles of project manager and business analyst. This is acceptable as long as it ensures good performance. But key is, to have all expertises/perspectives on board for best outcomes:
- Project Manager: The project manager ensures flawless communication between the team and the client, properly plans the scope of work, and tracks the project's progress.
- Business Analyst / Strategist: They are responsible for research. They study the potential users' needs and consider possible ways to meet existing needs with a real business solution.
- Software Architect / Technical Director: They analyzes the initial technical requirements and offers tools and methodologies for developing a cutting-edge application. A software architect creates your product's architecture and logic.
- UX/UI Designer: A UI/UX designer has two areas of responsibility. The first is research, where they work with the project manager or business analyst to study users' needs. The second is design, where they create an intuitive interface to make your product as appealing as possible. In most teams there will be one UX concepter and one UI designer.
Before the discovery phase begins, a few things need to be in place:
- Dentify business goals.
- Identify stakeholders, including product owners, administrators, end-users, investors, developers, or anyone involved in building or using the final product.
- Provide the project manager with any existing information or documentation about the project.
- Secure a budget for the discovery phase.
- No need for additional research.
And these are the phases of Discovery from pace’s experience:
1. KickOff Meeting with all relevant roles.
2. Consolidating idea, challenges and desired outcomes.
3. Collecting product information (already existing ones, i.e. from stakeholders). Deliverable: Business model canvas.
4. Establish business objectives.
5. Determine metrics for measuring success.
6. Conduct (user) research.
7. Review data and create a software requirements specification (SRS).
8. Map out the customer journey and pre-personas, validated by product studio session and first formulation of hypothesis. Deliverables: pre-persona profile, customer journey map, hypothesis table
9. Validation of first persona context through user interviews. Deliverable: Matured CJM & pre-persona.
10. Collaboration on prototype. Deliverable: Clickable prototype.
11. Refinement of prototype through user feedback. Deliverable: Technical design documement, timeline estimation, cost indication.
12. Analyze the competition.
The discovery phase includes a substantial research element, so you don’t need to conduct additional studies beforehand.
After a successful Discovery phase, we get following takeouts:
- Project roadmap
- Product prototype (design)
- Business model canvas
- Value proposition canvas
- Technology requirements specification
These deliverables result from analyzed data and serve as a reliable source of information for the product development team.
The cost of a discovery phase can range from 12,000 EUR to 25,000 EUR, depending on the project's complexity and team size. At pace, our discovery phase typically takes 3 to 5 weeks to complete for mid- to large-sized projects. We offer various deliverables depending on the project's requirements, such as a Software Requirements Specification (SRS), a UX and/or UI prototype, development roadmap and estimates, and a Discovery phase proposal; an absolute reliable foundation for all further steps of your project.
The Discovery phase is essential for clarifying the project's vision and minimizing development risks. Although for many clients, the Discovery phase may seem overly theoretical, it is the foundation for better projects in all aspects, including financial, timing, effectiveness, transparency, co-creation, focus, and control. We recommend integrating the Discovery phase for almost all project types to avoid any surprises and to make the process even more enjoyable 🙂
