Setting yourself up for success when doing discovery research

Discovery research is often the most challenging and complex research phase in the product lifecycle because it doesn’t always have a tangible outcome (e.g “let’s build that feature”) and their scope is often much broader than other types of research work. Discovery is also one of the most crucial part of the product lifecycle, because, done right, it gives the team the insights needed to solve real user and business problems at a market level.

The best time to do discovery research

Looking at the double diamond below, we can see that the discovery phase invites the research team to diverge and to understand a problem space in detail without solutionising too soon.

The best time to run discovery work is when the team isn’t sure what their users most important problems are. Discovery gives you the opportunity to explore and validate the problem space without restricting yourself to a narrow issue to solve. At this stage, you’re keeping an open mind and your goal should be to:

• Understand users, their context, background and needs and motivations

• Understand problems users are faced with and how it impacts them as well as your business

• Share as much context and evidence with stakeholders and to involve them in the decision making process throughout the phase

Setting up a discovery project

The major risk in discovery is for the product team and stakeholders to be misaligned on the objectives and deliverables for the phase. Regardless of your stakeholders being internal or external to your business, it’s a pretty safe bet to say that:

• They probably have assumptions about the problem to be solved and maybe a vision for how to solve it — all of this being unconsciously biased by their knowledge, previous experience solving similar problems and their role in the business.

• If they aren’t familiar with how the product lifecycle they might expect you to deliver solutions by the end of the discovery phase — but as discovery isn’t about solving problems just yet, you can imagine their disappointment at the end of the phase.

Running a kick off workshop at the beginning of the discovery phase is the best way to mitigate the risks we just discussed above. Kick off workshops are highly collaborative and give the team and stakeholders the opportunity to collaborate on a project charter. The project charter helps align on:

• the current situation and why the project is tackled now

• assumptions to test during the phase

• risks and constraints associated with the project

• objectives and success metrics for the project

At the end of the workshop, you should be able to articulate a shared vision and to use it for guidance throughout the discovery phase.

Planning discovery research

A well planned discovery phase helps ensure you uncover the right things, with the right people at the right time. The discovery team might be small (designer and/or researcher and/or PM) but it’s worth bringing some structure to the phase by working in sprints. The sprint cadence also helps with defining key milestones communication points with stakeholders (e.g “playback at the end of each sprint”).

When planning discovery, it’s good to have a high level plan for the whole phase but the focus should primarily be on the first couple of sprint. Everything after that remains important to plan but you need to remain flexible as what you’ll uncover in the first 2 sprints can potentially impact the direction you’ll take for the remaining of the phase.

Communicating with stakeholders

Aim to communicate discovery progress and findings with stakeholders as often as possible. This can be done formally, in a playback at the end of each sprint, and/or informally, on Slack or by email, sharing nuggets of insights to keep stakeholders engaged and excited.

In the best case scenario where stakeholders are generous with their time, I find that a mix of formal and informal communication with stakeholders works best. When dealing with time poor stakeholders, try and use written and concise communication as much as possible for them to quickly access the key takeaways you’re sharing with them.

Communicating often with stakeholders might seem time consuming but it helps keeping them onboard with the research, making it easier for you to get buy-in when it’s time to scope down the research focus and to prioritise certain areas of the problem.

Wrapping up discovery

End discovery with a playback session and invite stakeholders to revisit the project charter you collaborated on at the beginning of the project.

It might be that you achieved all the objectives for this phase and you make recommendations for what happen next (e.g “proof of concept”). Or the discovery phase needs to be extended slightly because there are still gaps in the team’s knowledge who doesn’t feel confident moving forward with ideating solutions just yet. Regardless, take this last playback as an opportunity to consolidate everybody’s knowledge on the problem to solve and the evidence you uncovered.

Finally, it’s always a good thing to run a retrospective with stakeholders at the end of the phase to gather feedback on what worked well, what didn’t work and could be improved as well as suggestions on how to do things differently next time.