Project Discovery: What is it and Why Do You Need it?

Without a doubt, delivering a great project supposes managing the development phases in an efficient way. Louis L'Amour once said: “A good beginning makes a good end” and for a project’s lifecycle this quote couldn’t be more true. In the product’s development the better you plan and prepare the processes, the more high-quality the final product is. And exactly the desire to deliver great software projects makes Project Discovery Phase important.

However, we tailor this stage to the needs of every client so even if your case isn’t mentioned, the Discovery Phase may still bring some benefits to you. Which ones? Let’s find out!

📈 Benefits of the Project Discovery: How it Will Help You

A correct Discovery helps both the team and the client to get on the same page and ensures a smooth workflow for the future development. Moreover it answers 2 important questions: “What exactly are we building? What do we need to build it?”

What are the other possible gains of the Project Discovery process for you? Take a look:

• The scope of work is clearly defined, allowing us to provide an estimate of the time frame and budget. This allows to manage cost expectations and understand which Web or Mobile product we’re building for you.
• There are no dark spots within the project — we have a comprehensive solution to each task and just need to execute it using our clear-cut workflow.
• Project Discovery Phase provides you with some material deliverables (mockups, a prototype, user stories, and use cases) that give you and us the full vision of your product. It can even be presented to investors and early-stage angels during Pre-Seed and Angel pitches.
• Finally, for both teams it’s a kind of test drive that helps our customer to decide whether we’re a good fit for future cooperation or not.

2. Story Building and Project Charter Creation

The main task at this stage is to complete the Project Charter and to gather User Stories regarding the project.

Project Charter is a document that contains the essential information regarding your project. Typically, it consists of the project's objectives, main stakeholders, its risks, benefits, and reasons. Being created by the Project Manager, it helps to explain in detail all the vital components stated above to stakeholders and the Tech Team. Thus, it creates a plan of the project’s basics that is going to be referenced at the next stages.

User Stories, in turn, are needed to have a better understanding of the user's desires and goals regarding the product. User Story is a way to express and structure what users want to see from their perspective in terms of features and functionality. Here’s a simple example: A user wants to sign up via Facebook or Google to avoid wasting time on filling in personal data.

By the way, you can check out our comprehensive explainer on User Story creation with a step-by-step instruction:

3. Prototyping

While the Project Charter is being filled with all the needed data, our UX-Designer is starting a UX Mind Map creation. This is the backbone of the application which shows how the mentioned use cases and user stories are implemented on different screens.

Finally, the mindmap is converted into an interactive and clickable prototype. Specifically, we at Stormotion use Figma as our prototype-building tool.

4. Technical Research

While the UX-Designer is working on the mindmap and prototype, Stormotion’s experienced Senior Tech-Team conducts separate research that provides us with an in-depth understanding of solving challenging tech tasks. This may be the integration of a specific feature, like an AI-Based matching algorithm or working with a non-common SDK, for instance.

Using a minimal UI and the simplest prototyping, Developers test these solutions to deal with the trickiest parts of the project.

5. Providing a Detailed Estimate

Finally, all the previous steps provide us and the client with a clearer vision of the project. It allows us to make a realistic and detailed estimate and move further to the development itself. For the Discovery process, this stage is the last one. The whole process is supported by the Project Manager.

For example, exploring the priorities in decisions may tell a lot about the business plan of a company and assist in creating your own products. Keeping in mind the researched advantages, designers will be able to synthesize even more advantageous products in terms of UX.

3. Create a good Unique Selling Point (USP) based on the conducted research.

After the two previous points, a designer should already have a vision of features and decisions that will be beneficial for the project. With the researched knowledge and the market examination, he can set a factor that differentiates this product from the competitors.

In this part, a Unique Selling Point (USP) for the project becomes more clear. USP is usually an aspect that makes a company outstanding in comparison with competing market propositions. Some famous selling points are without a doubt Stripe with their "Payments infrastructure for the internet", and Shopify’s "The platform commerce is built on".

Inspiring examples of great USPs are directly or indirectly emphasizing the unique features of the product. Exactly the correct emphasis creates a great vision of being ahead of the closest competitors. Knowing that companies are able to create notable marketing strategies to increase sales and recognition.

Discovery Stage on Technology

At this stage, the main role is taken by a new character — a Tech Lead. Firstly, in Stormotion’s project lifespan, he is responsible for tech ideas. His tasks are to generate new ideas regarding development as well as to monitor and verify the existing ones. Secondly, the application’s architecture along with technological best practices are also on his shoulders throughout the Project Discovery Phase.

At the highest level, Tech Lead’s role is to ensure the best technical stack for the project while avoiding potential risks at this point.

The main goals at this stage are:

1. Understand whether it’s possible to create the product or add a feature the client wants.

It’s a common case for a development team when there’s no certainty in whether it’s possible to fulfill customer’s requirements. As the variety of ideas that a client has regarding their product is unpredictable, exactly at this stage we conduct the idea’s “viability test”.

From the perspective of our experience and the projects we managed to build, an average DS assumes about 10-20% of the overall project cost. However, as an output we get a certain amount of finished work to use in the next development phases.

📈 How You Сan Make Project Discovery Effective

Earlier we already determined that the DS is a symbiotic process, where the goal is to achieve the best level of possible interaction. As a team that has been through a lot of various project discoveries, we have some tips on how to be a “Perfect Product Owner” in terms of making the DS much easier and more efficient.

If you’re willing to make this phase significantly beneficial for both sides, here are some tips on what you can structure on the Project Discovery Phase:

1. Note down your goals, expectations, and desires regarding the project. Exactly the method of writing down your thoughts not only helps you to overthink your priorities and set clear goals, but also makes it far easier for the Tech Team to meet your business needs.

2. While making the notes, we recommend you structure them in a “must-have/nice-to-have” way. In the “must-have” section you present the most essential features/expectations for your future project that you have in your mind, letting the Team focus on what you really need. In the “nice to have” section you provide your extra thoughts that may not be essential for the project, but you’d like to see if they work out as suitable. For a better understanding of how to prioritize the project’s future features, feel free to click the link down below.

Challenge № 2: “We need to have some telemetry information from an end user’s batteries when they are being monitored or when an individual battery check is done. The section showing an individual cell voltage requires a password and is not normally available for a user. This information we want to be sent to the Norsk website. Is it technically possible?”.

Our Output: First we found out that we can use the read command to retrieve data from the battery. Since this is possible, we have no problem forwarding this data elsewhere, depending on the customer's wishes.

Challenge № 3: “We’d like you to handle for each individual battery such parameters as voltage, SOC, # of charge cycles reported, balance of voltage between the batteries and separately between the cells, internal resistance, TREND internal resistance, report of any BMS fault event triggered, report time of a fault being cleared, peak charge voltage, average charge current and ability to notify users when they need to charge their stored batteries”.

Our Output: Since we can get data from the battery, it's possible to retrieve these parameters directly or indirectly (some of them must be calculated and defined manually by us based on conditions given by the customer).

Challenge № 4: “We’d like to have some API integration with our WordPress/WooCommerce website”.

Our Output: For now, we decided to stick with webview to keep things simple.