Discovery: The dirty word of digital development
“Andy Dufresne…who crawled through a river of sh** and came out clean on the other side.”—The Shawshank Redemption
In The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne teaches us that we have to be prepared to get down in the… mud… if we want to come out clean.
That’s how I feel about Discovery—the dirty word of digital development.
I rarely fight as hard for anything as I fight for robust discovery at the start of a project—because it’s here that we learn the most critical thing about our client and their project:
What it is they need.
This might sound uncontroversial—a no-brainer even—but in practice discovery can be a drop-down knuckle fight… with the client on the other side of the ring.
No matter. If we want to accelerate our digital delivery, it’s a fight we have to win.
You can’t always get what you want
The main point of conflict is pretty simple. When a client comes to an agency they almost always know what they want. An app. A cloud service. A website.
Our painful job—our duty—is to dig past what they want and get to the core of what they need.
And that takes time and effort.
It’s natural for a client to resist this. They’ve done their internal planning and due diligence. They may even have written an RFP. To clients, discovery often looks like an additional cost or pointless delay.
“We’ve done the discovery for you. The board wants progress. Let’s just get on with it.”
I’ve seen some agencies (and worked on some projects) where the team did just “get on with it”. No discovery beyond the RFP, no investigation or pushback. You want to pay us to build an app? We’ll build you an app.
And six months later there it is… an app that looks fine and works fine… but doesn’t solve the client’s underlying problem.
Because the agency—let’s call them Done 4U— never fully understood the problem. How could they? They never did the work.
Why we’re in the business of solving real problems
Leaving aside the problems of Done 4u’s client, we might think that the agency did okay. They answered an RFP, delivered the project, and got paid. Happy days.
But the client isn’t happy. To them, the project was a bust. How likely are they to come back to Done 4U with the next project?
The answer is obvious.
By surrendering on discovery, Done 4U’s talented team has lost the opportunity to solve the client’s problem, build trust, and open a long-term relationship.
(If you’ve read the first article in this series—on the principles of accelerated digital delivery—you’ll remember that trust is number one.)
It’s natural for clients to resist discovery, but if we can truly understand the problem, we have the opportunity to consider a range of solutions that might be better, faster, or cheaper.
Not a new website, but a change to their existing one.
Not an app on Android and iOS, but a web app to test the proposition.
Not a bespoke application, but a customised version of an online service.
If you’ve never seen a client’s face when you suggest something that will solve their problem in half the allocated time and budget, I urge you to try it. It’s a special moment— that builds trust and long-term relationships.
Of course, discovery doesn’t always uncover some big unknown opportunity. Very often, we end up doing a version of what the client thought they wanted. But even then, we still move forward with a better understanding of the landscape ahead, of the business goals, success criteria, and risks.
Discovery is about going slow to go fast. So let’s look at how we do it…
The four steps of Discovery
When I start a Discovery process, I’m looking for clarity in four areas.
1. Business goal (the problem to be solved)
This is mostly what I’ve discussed above: What’s the underlying problem that the business is seeking to solve (or the opportunity they seek to take advantage of). Common business goals include:
Increasing customer conversions.
Reducing operational costs.
Enhancing user engagement.
Improving efficiency in service delivery.
Clearly defining the business goal ensures that the digital solution we deliver can contribute directly to a measurable business outcome.
2. Digital goal (the solution)
Here we ask a critical question: Is the proposed digital goal the most effective way to achieve the necessary business goal?
If not, we have the opportunity to take a breath and explore different solutions. As an extreme example, a friend who worked for IBM was approached by a Premier League football team that was redeveloping their huge stadium and retail outlets. A big part of the RFP was a digital wayfinding experience (their words) that would guide visitors around the new site. This was certainly a possible solution, but good signage would have likely served far more people at a far lower cost.
The project did not proceed.
3. Risks and assumptions (RATS)
In my experience, few RFPs or clients have truly taken the time to assess the risks of their projects and the reasons they might fail.
This is a critical step, and thinking it through can often open up big questions that no one has considered. For example, I worked with a high-street bank that was developing a service to support small businesses. The RFP laid out the website they wanted, complete with video tutorials that covered all aspects of small business growth.
On its face, this seemed like a sensible opportunity to work on. Small businesses are the beating heart of any economy, and human inertia means that if you capture a company’s banking business early, you are likely to have it for a long time.
And yet, the opportunity was built over a huge and untested assumption… that small business owners would see this big bank as a credible source of startup advice.
When I asked this question in the discovery session, no one had an answer. No one had tested the idea nor surveyed the target audience. To misquote the fantastic movie above: If you build it… no one will come.
Here are some questions worth asking:
Will customers adopt the new solution?
Are internal processes equipped to support it?
What external factors could impact success?
Find your Riskiest Assumptions to Test (the RATS) and test them as part of the discovery process.
(A simple survey of the bank’s users would have given them the confidence to make the investment, the opportunity to address a perception problem, or the chance to create something that was attractive to the target market.)
4. Success criteria (KPIs)
This is where I see a lot of agencies getting nervous. When we define specific success criteria based on real business numbers, things can seem a lot harder. As a reminder, our notional agency Done 4U could claim success when they delivered on the project. They could add the client logo to their website and create a case study, even though the work did not deliver the result the client wanted.
Here’s a hard truth: If we want to do great work, we have to put our money where our mouth is and measure our impact.
Measuring success requires well-defined Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that go beyond general aspirations. Examples include:
Reducing customer service inquiries by 20%.
Increasing app conversions by 15%.
Achieving a 2-second page load time.
Some agencies resist genuine KPIs for understandable reasons. However good your new customer service app is, the client may not get their 20% reduction in support inquiries if they underpromote it or shortchange the hosting. Some things are always outside our control.
But that’s why the whole discovery process is important. We don’t set KPIs with our eyes closed or (this is the classic) take the suspiciously round number that the client is aiming for at face value. We dive deep into our client’s world. We find our RATS and test them. We do discovery.
Then we set realistic KPIs for the project with our eyes wide open… because later on we’ll want to prove that we delivered a genuine business benefit.
And even if we don’t meet the KPI—which happens sometimes—having a realistic target will tell us if we are heading in the right direction, and help us improve future interventions.
A stake(holder) in the ground
Woven through the four steps above is an understanding that every project has different levels of stakeholders with differing priorities, and we only win when they all win.
In the banking example above, the client wanted to attract new small business customers, but the customers wanted to build a small business. Those goals are related but not the same.
Or take the creation of a Content Management System (CMS).
The client (marketing or IT leadership) may prioritize integration with existing systems.
The customer (content creators) requires an intuitive and efficient interface.
The end-user (website visitors) needs a seamless browsing experience.
Discovery allows us to consider the needs of all stakeholders, ensure that they are aligned, or identify what needs to be done.
If I can’t align the needs of all the stakeholders—like rings on the ring toy above—I won’t proceed with the project.
Discovery is a conversation, not a meeting
Discovery shouldn't be seen as a one-time workshop or a static document that gets dumped in a drawer—but it often is. For some reason, the valuable insights from discovery often get forgotten when the rubber hits the road. Phew, everyone thinks. Now that’s done we can do some actual work.
But that’s not how the best agencies work. Spoiler alert: Things change during projects. Business goals shift. People move on. We learn ever more about our clients.
I’m not saying that we should constantly be moving the goalposts of success, simply that hitting a goal is more like sailing a yacht than driving a car. We know our destination, but to reach it we must take account of the shifting winds and ebbing tides.
At its best, discovery is an ongoing process that:
Keeps us focused on the right goal.
Reduces costly project pivots by validating assumptions early.
Strengthens trust between agencies and clients.
Identifies new opportunities beyond the initial scope.
The best agencies—and their clients—continue to refine their discovery insights months or even years into a project. It’s not a meeting, it’s an ongoing conversation.
Final thought: Slow down to speed up
Each of these articles is written in service of accelerating your digital delivery practice. On its face, the time we take to do discovery can often seem like slow time—which gives me the opportunity to remind you of the classic bear joke.
Here’s Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game:
The point, of course, is that we go slow at the start to go much faster later.
I’ve lost count of how many projects I’ve seen streak away like lightning… racing towards the wrong destination. (I’ve led some of them, and the result is never great.) At best there’s rework and overruns, at worst the project fails.
I solved that, years ago, by getting serious about discovery, and convincing my clients to do the same.
Start slow. Find your bear(ings). Then accelerate away.
Matt
P.S. If you’ve never seen The Shawshank Redemption, do yourself a favor and go watch it.
