What to ask your agency about discovery workshops
Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on discovery workshops, these questions are worth asking early.
Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.
Questions worth asking
- Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
- How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
- What happens if it needs changing in a year?
- What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?
What a good answer sounds like
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.
End with written decisions, not a mood board. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
What this looks like day to day
The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. 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
Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.