Discovery Workbook — ”Discovery vs Inception”
Often when starting working on a new project with a new client you need to find the best way to kick-off the project. To do this, you collectively (you & client) need to answer these 2 questions:
- What is the right thing to do?
- How to deliver it right?
To help answering these questions two frameworks exist:
- Discovery — doing the right thing;
- Inception — doing things right.
These two different processes are regularly confused and mixed-up leading to poor results. This document tries to clarify the differences between the two, so you can explain to your client which one is best to start with!
Discovery Litmus test
Often clients believe they know what the “right thing to do is“ and are unwilling to invest time or money into a Discovery, therefore they want to jump straight into Inception.
Below is a quick Litmus Test to know if you are “Inception ready”.
“Do we have?”
- A SINGLE clear user persona/target user group;
- The SINGLE most important opportunity/problem to solve for this group;
- Data (qualitative & quantitative) to back this up.
If the client can satisfactorily answer these questions then you can jump straight to Inception, otherwise you need to take the time to explain to the client why they need to do a Discovery first and get their buy-in.
The information in the next section is designed to give you the foundations to have this clarifying conversation.
Disclaimers:
- This articles and the series was written together with Simon Shepard;
- This article is the first one in a series entitled “Discovery Workbook”;
- The articles were written based on work done @ Equal Experts, so it’s written from a consultancy point of view, but they can be either used in any “product” company.