Discovery is not a meeting. It is the stage that makes every later decision cheaper.
Discovery is not a meeting. It is the stage that makes every later decision cheaper.
Discovery exists so that the expensive decisions get made while they are still cheap to change. Moving a section in a document costs nothing. Moving it after the build costs real money.
It is also where you find the constraints nobody mentioned in the brief: the legacy system that has to stay, the approval nobody can skip, the launch date fixed by something outside the project.
A written record of the goals in measurable terms, an audit of what exists today, a view of the competition, and a scope with a number attached. If a discovery phase ends without those, it was a conversation, not a phase.
You should also get the uncomfortable findings. A discovery that only confirms what you already believed was not looking hard enough.
One to two weeks for most projects. Long enough to talk to the people who actually run the business, short enough that momentum survives it.
Whoever actually runs the thing. Not only the marketing lead, but the person who processes the orders, answers the phone, and knows which step in the process everybody dreads. They hold the operational detail that never reaches a brief.
The most useful findings almost always come from somebody who was not on the original invite list. In one project the decisive constraint came from an accounts assistant who mentioned, in passing, that every order had to be re-entered by hand into a separate system.
What happens today when an enquiry arrives? Walk me through it. What do you wish you could stop doing? Which competitor do you lose to, and why do you think that is? What has been tried before and abandoned, and what happened?
The last one saves the most money. Repeating a failed initiative with a new coat of paint is common, expensive, and entirely avoidable if somebody asks early enough.
None of these are design questions. All of them change the design.
Occasionally the honest output is that the project should not happen, or not yet, or not in this form. The budget would be better spent on the operational problem underneath, or the timing is wrong, or the thing being asked for would not move the number anyone cares about.
That is a good result delivered at the cheapest possible moment. It is also the reason discovery has to be a paid phase — advice you can act on is worth paying for, and free advice tends to agree with whatever you already wanted.
A goals document that states what the project must achieve in numbers rather than adjectives: enquiries per month, cost per acquisition, time to publish a page, hours saved on manual work. If the goal cannot be written with a number in it, it will not be possible to tell afterwards whether the project worked.
A content inventory of the existing site, page by page, with traffic and a decision against each: keep, rewrite, merge, delete. This is the single most useful document in most redesigns, and the one clients are most often not given.
A technical audit covering hosting, performance, integrations and anything that constrains the build. And a sitemap with the argument of the site laid out in order, because the order of the argument is the design decision everything else follows from.
Redesigns get a different discovery from new builds. The most valuable half hour is usually spent in the analytics, finding the pages that already earn attention and the ones nobody has read in two years. Businesses are consistently wrong about which is which, and the surprise is worth the fee on its own.
The second most valuable half hour is spent with whoever maintains the site. They know exactly which parts are painful to update, and that pain is usually invisible from the outside. A site that takes forty minutes to publish a post is quietly costing more than the redesign will.
We also read the enquiry inbox where clients let us. The questions people ask before buying are the outline of the pages you are missing.
Sometimes discovery turns up something the project cannot fix: the offer is unclear, the pricing is wrong, the market has moved. A new website will not solve any of those, and building one anyway means taking money for a thing that cannot work.
We say so, in writing, before the build starts. Occasionally that ends the project. More often it changes it into a smaller, more useful one, and the relationship survives long enough to do the bigger work later on better foundations.
A discovery phase that has never once told a client to stop is not a discovery phase. It is a formality with an invoice attached.