Design Discovery

No design project starts from scratch. Brand managers, technical roles, and design teams all have perspectives that contribute to a valuable final product. It’s the Discovery phase objective to gather and align on them all. Above all else, it is important to solve the right problem.

In my last role, I led the UX team in establishing a protocol for Discovery that positioned multiple digital products for success.

Challenges

Many of our Discovery requests had one, two, or all three challenges in common:

• Poor understanding business priorities, user pain points, and technical feasibility

• Stakeholders and sponsors that were unfamiliar or disinterested in process

• A siloed or imbalanced mix of creative, technical and non-technical stakeholders

Tenets

In each project, we overcame challenges by applying these tenets:

1: Treat Discovery as a continuous process - Agility is a top priority in all digital product endeavors. We commonly received unfinished briefs that required us to advocate for 1-2 week Discovery phases. This resulted in a lean approach with “quick and dirty” artifact creation. If an unplanned event or pivot required additional product strategy, we flexed to address that need outside of the planned Discovery phase.

2: Define and redefine roles & responsibilities as needed - A RACI matrix is traditionally a project management tool, and some may argue an outdated one. However, in an urgent and sometimes chaotic environment, we found it helpful to even take 30 minutes to discuss as an internal team. This allowed individual contributors the flexibility to improvise and pair up to solve the most important issues.

3: Workshop to maximize collaboration - Workshopping with stakeholders was the single most important method we used to work through areas of ambiguity. This was easy to incorporate into our process with remote collaboration tools such as Miro. Sometimes key workshopping objectives were established during project planning. Other times we suggested workshop activities as a way to work through a specific disagreement.

4: Build momentum and focus - Discovery is not a means to it’s own end. Tangible deliverables aside, we measured our success by how prepared the team felt to begin wireframing and prototyping.

Case Studies

Note: Due to confidentiality agreements, I cannot share further details of this work. I am happy to present the details in person or over video call.