Our Discovery phase: Q&A

Last week, we posted a blog post talking about our process and the way we help our customers shine. The post received huge attention from potential partners, and we’ve received many questions about our process, especially about our “discovery” phase and how bad discovery at early stages can lead to startup failure. Thus, we have decided to write another post about Discovery, and we hope this blog post answers some of your critical questions.

What is customer/market/product discovery? 

Discovery is doing primary user research as it is critical to understand the problem you need to solve for the market. When you know their pains, needs, and wants, you gain insights into what aspects of the problem you will need to prioritize.

Why is the discovery phase non-negotiable?

A misconception at the start of a project might lead to further uncertainty, squandering both time and money later. It is the single most crucial part of your start-up journey, and if you can validate the problem hypothesis in the market with the customer, you are halfway to early success.

You may now ask, “I can just do it myself, why should I need you, MobileFolk, to help me with this phase?”

Here are some critical things that you can get out of this phase, of course, with our help:

1. Improved project scope and goal identification.
2. Collect the evidence to drive the decision rather than prejudgments.

You may also ask, “What should I do to prepare for this Discovery phase?” or “What will we do together at this stage?”

The things we would do at this stage include but are not limited to:

• Determining your business validation objective.
• Defining who is responsible for the position of product discovery owner.
• There is no need for more research as the discovery process contains extensive primary market research.You should also be prepared with secondary market research connected to the project.
• Setting up project management tool to document the discovery findings to convert them into actionable insights during the decision-making.

Sounds good so far, right? If your question is about our steps, here’s the answer:

• Identifying the key stakeholders.
• Identifying business objectives.
• Defining success criteria (KPIs)
• Examining past findings and documents.
• Competitive analysis
• Examining for biases
• Estimating the MVP timeline and budget
• Creating a Roadmap

Finally, we’ve also received some questions regarding the timeline for a typical discovery. Our answers are as follows: 

• For a small assignment — 1 week.
• For a medium assignment — 2 – 3 weeks.
• For a large assignment — at least one month or more.

If you still have more questions, let us know! We at MobileFolk can help with technical development discovery with the available user research data you collect. If you need any help, then let’s have a chat; we believe in relations over the business.