The purpose of a Discovery phase is to gather context, define requirements, and align stakeholders before starting a project. It typically involves activities such as workshops, stakeholder interviews, market/user research, competitive analysis, and more.

We find that the main activity is the Discovery Workshop. This is typically a 2 to 3 hour session (can be larger depending upon the project) with about 6 key stakeholders, e.g., a representative from your marketing team, IT team, sales team, and someone to represent the end user. Maybe more, depending upon business needs. This can be done in person or remotely, and frequently requires smaller follow-up workshops to dive deeper into specific areas.

The output of the Discovery phase is typically a comprehensive report that includes a summary of findings, a requirements document in the form of user stories and acceptance criteria, timelines, and itemised quote. Sometimes it can also include things such as user personas, user journey maps, and wireframes, but this is not always necessary or appropriate depending upon the project. Basically you should be provided with everything you need to be able to hand this report to any competent design or development team and they should be able to pick it up and run with it.

Also, depending upon the payment structure, you should ideally aim to own the deliverables produced during the Discovery phase, so that if you decide to switch vendors or continue the project in-house, you have full control over the assets and insights generated.

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