Discovery is the phase of a project that helps teams figure out what to build. In my upcoming book, Agile Discovery & Delivery: A Survival Guide for New Engineers & Entrepreneurs, I discuss three discovery frameworks: lean start-up, design thinking, and google design sprints. The book is for new engineers, so if they land on a team doing discovery work or in a start-up, it’s important for them to know how they can contribute to the Discovery Phase. A lot of times, teams aren’t doing Discovery work. New engineers generally won’t have a lot of influence over whether their teams do a Discovery Phase, but I did write a little section about convincing leaders to do one. I ended up cutting this section from book, but I still think it’s important. I kept some key information about how to get started if your organization isn’t doing a Discovery Phase (like these survival tips). If you wish I wouldn’t cut it, make your case in the comments!
Why Shouldn’t You Skip The Discovery Phase?
A lot of companies skip the discovery phase. They hear requests from their customers and jump right to building solutions. Or an executive comes up with an idea and leads the charge towards making it a reality. In fact, most of the companies I’ve worked at do a very poor job of validating ideas before sanctioning a project. It may seem like these decisions are above your pay grade as an engineer. But, there are some things you can do to help your company validate its assumptions. Here are a few excuses some teams give to skip the discovery phase and what you can do about them:
Our customers have already told us what they want.
This is a great place to start, actually. You know that there’s a problem your customers think they’re willing to pay for. But it ignores one fundamental truth about our customers.
Customers don’t know what they want until they see it.
For every problem, there are many solutions. Some solutions fit into your customers’ existing processes and habits, some don’t. Some fit your customers’ budgets and some don’t.
It’s easier to get good feedback if you show your customers what you’re planning to build. Spend a week to build a prototype and test it with your customers. This will either confirm that you understand their needs or that you don’t. If you don’t, you have the chance to iterate or pivot and you’ve only lost a week. (Although I would argue that learning is never a loss!)
The alternative, of course, is diving into a project, working on it for a few months, releasing it, and then finding out it doesn’t meet your customers’ needs. Which is the more cost-effective method? If you validate your assumptions and find them to be right, you’ve only added a couple of weeks to the project. If you skip validation and determine that your assumptions are wrong, you’ve added an entire release cycle to your project. That can get expensive when we’re talking about an entire team of 10 people!
It’s always less expensive to validate up-front. And, you almost always get feedback that improves your product in the process. That’s not time wasted, that’s an entire release cycle’s worth of time gained.
We don’t have time for a discovery phase.
See above. You don’t have time NOT to run a discovery phase. If you’re under a tight deadline, reduce scope, but don’t skip the discovery process. You can always make improvements to your product later.
Customers wouldn’t have told Apple they wanted an iPhone because that idea was so ahead of its time.
Henry Ford also told us that if he’d asked his customers what they wanted, they would have told him a “faster horse”. What Apple and Ford did well was not see into the future. They fully understood their customers — their hopes, their dreams, their habits, their needs, their problems, and their lives. When you understand your customers that well, you know what problems they need to solve. Engineers are close to technology. We know what’s possible and can make the leap between customer needs and product ideas. Customers, in most cases, can’t do that. That’s exactly what Apple and the Ford Motor Company did. Apple and Ford didn’t skip the discovery phase. They came up with creative ways to solve the problems they found out about by talking to customers.
