Discovery workshops: the questions we get asked most

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. The questions about discovery workshops that come up most often on our calls.

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Do we need to care about this?

A few focused hours prevents months of wrong direction. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens.

How do we know it is working?

End with written decisions, not a mood board. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

The short version

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Three things worth confirming about discovery workshops before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Get the decision-makers in the room, not just their proxies — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.