Early Discovery Outcomes

We want our projects to start out on the right foot and have a clear direction, but also avoid waste and deliver value to the customer as quickly as possible.

Early on, we want to first work to clearly understand the problem and then address the big risks early on. At first, this knowledge will be more big-picture and there may be multiple potential solutions to our problem, but it is critical for us to first understand the problem that we are trying to solve in order to have clarity in our decision making.

Our teams may go through an ideation process to guide the customer through clarifying the problem and generating ideas for potential solutions.

Once we have some potential solutions, we can begin to evaluate them by considering how well they address our big risks:

A solution delivered on scope, schedule, and budget, that does not solve a real problem should be considered a failure.

So, early on, most importantly we want to focus on understanding value and viability risks. Feasibility and usability are important to gauge at a high-level early on, but the delivery team will own these risks continually throughout the project as well as individual stories are prioritized, designed, and implemented.

All estimates are guesses, but once we have a better understanding of what we might build and the associated risks, we have a better ability to move toward a high-integrity commitment.

In addition to building a better understanding of what we should build, discovery is also an opportunity for us to set expectations and to teach our customers how effective software development can work early in the process. User story maps are incredibly valuable tool for this, as they help to communicate the necessity of prioritization and emphasize a multiple release approach, with first releasing an MVP for early feedback and subsequent releases building on a solid foundation, with iterative work grounded in decisions based on real user feedback.