The Discovery Phase

Be specific about who you want to better understand as part of your discovery work and assess how you'll reach them. Be granular about roles and responsibilities. Assess what will differ for say, a senior manager or someone on a graduate scheme.

During discovery, we conduct interviews, focus groups, surveys, and observations to gain a better understanding of our audience. You’ll need to identify a manageable sample of your audience and decide on the best approach for each group.

For example, interviews with 10 retail staff, a focus group with 9 store managers, and a day of observations at a retail store is manageable and gives you good variety of approaches.

Good discovery is reliant on relaxed and informed participants who feel comfortable opening up to you.

To create a safe environment for your discovery, reach out to your participants. Let them know who you are, what you’re doing and why, and what they can expect from the discovery work. Ultimately the work you’re doing will benefit your participants, so creating this trust up-front is a great way to start.

Get out there and conduct your discovery!

Whatever methods you employ, make sure you’re capturing data consistently so you can analyse it effectively.

It’s often hard to know when to stop your discovery work, and whilst there’s no definitive answer to this, it’s usually a good idea to stop when you feel you’ve got some clear themes that have emerged and you’re able to imagine some high-level solutions.

Analyse your key themes and data from discovery to create a discovery report. This report outlines your findings so that you can engage stakeholders with the causes of the problem and provide some valuable insight into their organisation.
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