After 23 years of operating Flower Press Interactive and 18 years of building award-winning digital products, I can confidently say that a professionally guided Discovery phase can make or break a product.
Discovery is the process by which our studio leads stakeholders through an ideation and research sequence to validate direction before build. You can think of this as drawing up the blueprints of a house. When we begin this process, clients are at different levels of preparedness. We are accustomed to working with a wide range of clients and enabling them to succeed, no matter where they begin.
Our process is designed to create or validate the following:
- Establish the business mission and values.
- Clarify the product concept and value proposition.
- Articulate the product offerings and key differentiators.
- Understand the target market and the problems the product solves.
- Understand competitors and the product’s unique market position.
- Evaluate the high-level customer experience online and offline.
- Consider pricing and monetization strategy.
With these high-level concepts in mind, we build a product plan. This involves mapping out product requirements and validating them with end-users. Our process includes the creation of the following:
- Detailed product requirements
- Workflow diagrams
- Wireframes
- Clickable prototypes
Once we have the high-level concept solidified, we schedule research sessions with users to validate ideas.
We generally talk with 3 – 5 users from each audience. For example, if we’re building a tool for doctors and patients, we would take to 3 – 5 doctors, and 3 – 5 patients to validate their experiences. During this process we create the following:
- Recorded sessions with users
- Notes and takeaways
- Affinity diagrams to capture themes
- Notes regarding changes or adjustments needed
We think of product plans as a hypothesis we need to test. During user research we get our first pass, at verifying direction. Often, our plan has holes, or our strategy needs refinement. Often we need to make adjustments and try again. The beauty of talking to 3 – 5 users, is it keeps costs low. Validation is cheap. We can move on and try again.
We typically recommend at least two research phases. We like to fail quickly, regroup, and try again.
The next time you consider working with a developer, ask yourself: Do I know what I’m doing? If the answer is “no” consider a studio that offers a Discovery phase. This planning phase is critical to the success of your product.
To learn more about Our Approach, visit our website.
Have a new product idea? Contact Us.