How to get around a Discovery Stage and not die trying?

The first thing you should know is that discussing design stages in which “you don’t design” is usually a hard to explain but necessary challenge. It is vital for our customers to understand the importance of devoting a few hours to think through and understand what we have to do to improve a digital product.

At EGO we often say that conducting a Discovery Stage allows us to do two basic things:

• The first one is to align the expectations of the entire team (our own and the customer’s), unify objectives and establish the basis for the upcoming stages.
• The second –and the one customers like the most– is that a good Discovery stage saves time and money, since we avoid re-processing during development.
  

So, What is the Discovery Stage?

This is the stage where we will study everything related to a digital product: who uses it, why they use it and how they use it, as well as the objectives and requirements of the business. We will do this with the help of tools and dynamics that allow us to explore, analyze, and set improvement goals and a strategy to achieve them.

Which are those tools and dynamics?

Actually, there are thousands. The decision of which ones we should choose will always depend on the product to be developed, but we can tell you a few that we, at EGO, tend to use –not always together or in the same order–, and that have been of great help to us:

• Lean Canvas
• Value proposition
• Benchmarking
• Metrics study
• Stakeholder interviews
• User interviews
• Jobs to be done
• Information architecture analyses
  

Who should participate in this Discovery stage with you?

The general answer would be "everyone involved in the project", but if we get more specific, it would add value to include the following:

• Product Owners
• Product designers
• UX/UI designers
• Project managers
• Stakeholders (managers, customer service team…)
• At least one member of the development team
  

Therefore, having made this list of important items and to conclude this article, we can tell you that in order to get around a Discovery Stage and not die trying, it is best to be clear about what you need.

1. Make sure your customer understands the importance of this instance.
2. Be prepared to find supporting information, research and learn more about this subject than if you were studying to take a final exam.
3. Empathize with the user of this digital product (and the business behind it), always keeping the following questions in mind: Why are we doing this? What are we looking to improve?
4. Invite people to participate in the process; open your mind to other opinions, and practice “active listening”

And finally, remember that even if you feel that you have finished everything, that you have already outlined the steps to follow, the objectives and the strategy, digital products are alive, they are usually 100% iterative and should never stop being measured in search of continuous improvement (even if you yourself were the author of the latest improvement).