When discovery workshops is worth the effort

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. Discovery workshops is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

When it is worth it

A few focused hours prevents months of wrong direction. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge.

How to decide

End with written decisions, not a mood board. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

In practice

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

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.