Continuous Discovery

Most projects have an aspect of discovery running throughout. There is a need to constantly be diving deeper into user stories and fleshing out a backlog as it gets closer to the time they will be worked on. Frontloading too much discovery risks investigation and wasted work on items that may not be prioritized to the top and built, and doing too little risks not having enough information available when items are ready to be worked on, creating a bottleneck.

While early discovery activities help us to establish a direction and an initial backlog, continous discovery allows us to iron out details just-in-time as long as we are developing.

We will need to:

• add detail and acceptance criteria to the backlog as we get closer to working on items
• incorporate feedback into our backlog
• break down stories into smaller pieces
• continually reprioritize the backlog as we understand more
• initiate design work on stories that are quickly approaching

This will typically done through collaboration of multiple perspectives, and, after first release, additionally taking into account user feedback and usage data to make decisions.

Typical outputs of our continuous discovery work:

• Clarity on priorities and a continuously improving backlog
• Viable approaches and directions for stories
• Design concepts, mockups
• Research findings