Before you invest in discovery workshops

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. Before you spend anything on discovery workshops, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• A few focused hours prevents months of wrong direction
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

The mistakes we see most

Get the decision-makers in the room, not just their proxies. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

End with written decisions, not a mood board. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

The short version

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. Three things worth confirming about discovery workshops before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• End with written decisions, not a mood board — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.