Discovery sprints: a complete guide

If you’re starting a digital project, you might already have a brief, or at least a rough idea of what’s required, or a vision of what you want and need it to do. No matter how much preparation and thought has gone into the request for proposal (RFP) stage, most organisations will benefit from a structured discovery process. It surfaces the real challenges, aligns stakeholders, and ensures you build the right thing in the right way – before a single line of code is written.

In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about discovery sprints:

• What a discovery sprint is and why it matters
• The benefits of completing one
• What you need to prepare and bring to a discovery sprint
• What deliverables you’ll receive

What is a discovery sprint?

A discovery sprint is an accelerated and focused period of research and discussion that sets up a digital project. It usually involves:

• A structured in-person or virtual workshop session with your internal stakeholders and digital partner.
• Independent research conducted by your digital partner with follow-up questions around key user tasks and journeys, processes, and potential technical solutions.
• Scoping of the project including timelines, budgets, and a list of deliverables.

Product management coach Tim Herbig describes product discovery as “the evidence-informed process of reducing uncertainty as you find problems worth solving and solutions worth building.”

Discovery helps both you and your digital partner to challenge assumptions around the project and get to the core of what will deliver the most value for your investment. Whether you have an existing brief or not, a discovery sprint is a highly valuable way to ensure you build the right thing, in the right way for you and your users.

Why do a discovery sprint?

The discovery phase is widely considered the most important part of a digital project, which is backed by evidence. 83% of UX practitioners who undertake a discovery phase go on to complete projects they report as successful.

In brief, the top reasons to do a discovery sprint are:

• Challenge assumptions about the project and your users
• Define, expand or refine the scope for the project (whether you have a brief or not)
• Nail the absolute must-have features and avoid scope creep further down the line
• Involve experts at an early stage to bring broader knowledge and expertise to better shape your project
• Defining, refining and expanding your brief

Let’s dive into the specific benefits of doing discovery a bit more.

Challenge assumptions

You and stakeholders in your digital project will naturally have preconceived assumptions about your business, your audience, and the features that your website or digital products does or doesn’t need. It’s important to go through a process that challenges these assumptions, to ensure you’re making decisions based on data and analysis rather than feelings and opinions. Discovery helps you confront these preconceptions in a structured way, with the benefit of “outside eyes” too, in the form of your digital partner.

Define, refine or expand your brief

Having a detailed website or digital product brief is a really helpful starting point for any website digital product, but it’s not essential going into a discovery sprint. Briefs or RFPs come in all shapes and sizes, with varying levels of detail on background and technical specifications, and it’s not uncommon for the partner agency to support with writing the bulk of the objectives and scope. And if you already have a brief, a discovery sprint can help you expand or refine where necessary.

Bringing expertise in early

Depending on your experience, you may frame a digital project and write the brief in a different way – with more of a technical, strategic or creative slant. One of the key benefits of working with a partner like Adaptable is that you get access to in-depth knowledge and experience in all of those areas. The team running your discovery will include experts in design, development, project management and SEO, bringing depth and breadth of knowledge to the table.

Discovery sprint process: what to expect

The idea behind a sprint in project management is that it’s an accelerated process, helping you get from A to B as quickly and efficiently as possible. Typically, our discovery sprints take around two weeks to complete from start to finish, with three clear stages.

Stage 1: Workshop

An in-person or virtual workshop involving key stakeholders and project team from our side and yours. We use this structured discussion to explore project objectives, define key users and tasks and discuss required functionality.

Stage 2: Research & Specification

Following the workshop, we go away and conduct in-depth research into how we would approach your project. We’ll go and find answers to questions and challenges raised during discovery, which often includes investigation with third-party apps, platforms or other agencies involved in the project. During this phase, if the project requires it, we’ll also conduct an SEO audit of your current website or websites, providing recommendations for site structure and content migration and optimisation to ensure the new website will perform well organically.

Stage 3: Statement of Work

We will then compile our findings into a document called a Statement of Work. This covers project specification, delivery method, timescales, costs and detail on processes in terms of project management and communication. This document serves as a detailed specification that we all collectively sign up to, agreeing on what we will deliver, when and how.

Discovery sprint preparation: what to bring

As your digital delivery partner, depending how much detail you’ve provided already, we may ask you to do some additional prep for a discovery workshop, just to ensure we have all of the information we’ll need. This could include:

• User and traffic data for key pages and content
• Detail around platforms, software and/or plugins you currently use
• Main competitors and sites you like for design inspiration

The key thing to bring to a discovery workshop as a client is honesty, openness and a willingness to work closely with an external team to challenge some key assumptions about your organisation. The project team will work with you to dig right into the how, what and why to ensure you get exactly what you need to set the right starting point.

Discovery deliverables: what happens post-sprint?

Once you’ve completed a discovery sprint, you’ll have a clear direction, strategy and roadmap for your project and beyond. This work can then act as a brief for your website or digital product – usually consisting of a strategy document, statement of work and project plan. Put simply, this piece of work supercharges your digital strategy and ensures that your digital project starts off on the right foot.

Let’s look briefly at some of the specific deliverables and insights you get from a discovery sprint.

Project scope and objectives

Scope creep causes up to 92% of projects to fail. The dreaded scope creep refers to the uncontrolled increase or change in a project’s requirements over time, and often results in projects going over budget, missing deadlines, and in the worst case – failure.

The discovery phase helps you focus on the core objectives of the project and the steps required to get there. Anything that is not relevant to the core project objectives can be moved to future stages. At the end of the discovery process, you’ll get some high-level project objectives and a list of deliverables for each phase (if multiple phases are proposed).

User personas and journeys

Despite having more access than ever to user data, just 49% of organisations actually use this data to guide their strategy. Analysing existing user data, as well as collecting feedback from your users, can be invaluable in guiding a digital project. Discovery will bring all of this data together and create actionable insight. You’ll get a list of all of your key user types (internal and external), and what tasks they need to be able to complete via your digital platform. This will then guide the way in which your digital experiences are designed and developed to make them as useful as possible to your users.

Technical approach and strategy

Undertaking a discovery sprint with a partner like Adaptable gives you access to expertise around the latest technologies and frameworks that can help unlock more ways forward on your project than you previously thought possible. Discovery helps us look at your key requirements around functionality, as well as your user personas and journeys, and suggest the best technical approach.

This includes:

• How your digital ecosystem/architecture will be structured and delivered
• The reasons and benefits behind this approach for you and your users
• Detail around any third-party apps and integrations that are required and how these would be managed
• Descriptions of specific functionality and features required and how these will be approached technically
• A list of components/blocks that are needed

Digital roadmap

A strong digital strategy considers the future as well as the present. Through discovery, you will get a roadmap of what can be delivered in the mid to long-term, as well as the (relatively) short-term. You’ll get an idea of realistic timelines and how development will be chunked up across your project. This includes details around how your digital experience will initially be built and launched with growth and scalability in mind.

Indicative costs

A discovery findings or statement of work document will set out broken down costs for design and development on your project. It’ll also include detail around any ongoing investment required, as well as additional costs for licensing third-party apps or software.

Summing up

• A discovery sprint is a focused period of research, discussion and planning, usually spanning about 2 weeks, setting up your digital project for success.
• Benefits of a discovery sprint include challenging assumptions; defining, refining and expanding your brief; nailing must-have functionality and what can be worked on later; and bringing expertise in at the planning stage.
• Up to 83% of projects that begin with discovery are reported to be successful.
• Following discovery, you’ll have defined project objectives, scope, technical specifications, timelines, and costs.
• Undertaking discovery helps avoid scope creep, misaligned requirements, and the risks of building something which isn’t right for you or your users.

We prefer to start every digital project with a discovery sprint. It helps us to explore all of the possibilities and client challenges in an accelerated timescale and set out the right digital product and the right approach for building it. Wherever you are on your journey with starting a new digital project, we can help you set off in the right direction.

Discovery is a process which unlocks invaluable insight into your organisation and your digital strategy. A discovery phase will undoubtedly result in a higher-quality, user-centric end product (and less stress!)

Need some help unlocking the way forward? Get in touch – we’d love to chat about your project.