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When someone mentions UX design images of beautiful wireframes and fully functional prototypes likely come to mind. And while I love a good wireframe, it’s really the context building that leads to intuitive products.
Enter the discovery engagement! Discovery gives everyone on the product team (customer success, developers, managers, etc.) the opportunity to vocalize exactly what their goals are for the product, what constraints might keep those goals from being achieved, and to set the overall direction for the sprint. Essentially, it’s an opportunity to catch misunderstandings and assumptions before resources are poured into pixel perfect designs.
So let’s dig into what a discovery phase or engagement might entail.
When is a discovery engagement appropriate?
A discovery session is warranted:
- when you have questions that need to be answered about product direction
- if you're not sure where to allocate resources or need help prioritizing features, backlogs, etc
- if you need buy-in from the team
For example, maybe you want to introduce an analytics tool to your content management platform but you’re not exactly sure where it should live. In this instance, you might want to focus on understanding what your customers would want to know more about or where in the hierarchy the tool should live.
Or maybe you’re just beginning to develop your MVP and you need to really nail down what should be included. In this case, a discovery session might focus on understanding the larger problem space and what options already exist to address it.
In both of these scenarios, the point of the engagement isn't to come out with a pixel perfect design but rather to have an informed direction and therefore higher chances of success.
How is it structured?
Unless you’re a one person show, best practice is to involve someone who can speak to:
The people who participate in the engagement are what truly leads to the “discovery” and the more disciplines invited the more bases are covered. However, don’t get too out of control. There’s a fine line between having too many or too few cooks in the kitchen.
A collaborative workshop (read more about our workshops here) is the most common first step. However it can sometimes be difficult to get everyone on the same schedule and if that’s the case you can do this work asynchronously through audits, interviews, and/or competitive analysis. The main objective is to uncover as much information as necessary to create a conversation between the different stakeholders so that at the conclusion critical questions will have been asked and answered.
What will we get out of it?
Regardless of methodology, it’s important to decide what deliverables will be most helpful to your team going forward. Some examples include:
To decide what will be most helpful for you, you'll need to factor in the scope of the phase, the difficulty of the problem, and duration of the project.
To recap
If you’re new to the concept of discovery, it can take some time to get used to. It’s not a fast paced, jump right into solving a problem, visual feedback kind of engagement. Rather, it’s the slow mapping of a strategy to a problem(s) with potentially endless approaches.
To get the most out of discovery, keep these things in mind:
