EP077 The Power of the Discovery Phase: Reducing Uncertainty in Projects
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[00:00:06] Darin Newbold: good day and welcome to Commerce Today. My name is Darin Newbold. I'm very excited to be here and also have a return guest, Anna Krajinska, one of our solution architects, and very excited to have her here to talk about unlocking project success, mastering the discovery phase. Welcome, Anna. Glad to have you.

[00:00:25] Anna Krzyżańska: It's good to be back. 

[00:00:26] Darin Newbold: I appreciate that. Well, let's just get started. So can you explain a little bit about the discovery phase, why it's important? 

[00:00:34] Anna Krzyżańska: Okay. So in Creatuity, the discovery phase is just like an initial stage of each project. we try to analyze the business of the client. We try to make our own research.

the main objective, sir, is to basically clarify the project requirements in that discovery phase find some potential risks of the project. And sometimes we even able to basically create a very specific project scope based on that discovery phase. 

[00:01:08] Darin Newbold: Well, perfect. So it sounds like it's, the discovery is very crucial.

Thank you. To putting a project together and even so crucial that how can it kind of really help reduce improve the overall planning of making a project successful. 

[00:01:23] Anna Krzyżańska: So the initial phases of discovery is that we need to bring all the stakeholders in one place as early as we can and start to gather the data.

And it has a huge impact after all when we start, you know, execute the project because the way we work and how we proceed with discovery phase bring us more realistic timelines, more realistic budget. and we are sure that everyone are on the same page, all the stakeholders, any kind of, people that are involved in the project had the same understanding what's going on, what needs to be done.

[00:02:02] Darin Newbold: Perfect. And uh, gaining all of this information that puts us in a place to, to know, basically create expectations for both sides, for both us as the agency, as well as for the, for the client. So. As you're doing this, I can imagine that there's some very key questions that need to be asked to really dig into a lot of this information.

Can you share a little bit more on that? 

[00:02:26] Anna Krzyżańska: Yeah. So I would start with that. We need to make something to collect the requirements, right? So we are trying to gather business requirements from our clients and to do that, we need to ask a very specific questions. Sometimes there are very simple questions.

Sometimes there are very complex questions. But when we bringing this questions to the table, to our clients, it's very important because it can push the client to rethink some of the needs he, he is presenting to us based on different perspective, like technological perspective that sometimes it changes.

the business requirements and the other way around. So this is very crucial to, to find a common ground and on the ground, prepare that list of questions and be on the same page that we are not asking those questions just because, you know, we want to look professional. For example, we ask you those questions because we want to know your business.

We want to know you. What do you need? and that's very important part. We want to know what you need from us. So, I'm just 

[00:03:40] Darin Newbold: kind of thinking about this. do you have maybe an example or two of some key questions that help unlock those stakeholders into sharing the information that we, that's going to impact the whole discovery phase as well as the estimates for time and budget for what's going to be needed to do that.

What are, what are maybe some examples? 

[00:04:04] Anna Krzyżańska: In my mind, I always see the client that just get this very general question from, from someone like, what do you need? Right? This is a very general question. And it always gives an incomplete answer. You will never get all the information you need. You need to, to discover the business to, to find the best solutions for your client to, to find how to bring the best performance to your store, for example.

So we are focusing on asking very specific questions like, where was the last time you did for example, an audit of your performance of your store, right. And that can bring. all the topics that are connected to your performance of your business, store performance, for example. There's other many questions we can ask, right.

That will basically trigger some kind of like, Oh, okay. So there's also this thing I should think of like, and I didn't. So yeah, it's, it's our job to ask those questions and trigger a client to, to find. Maybe even a new approach to the business. Sometimes it happens that there'll be a new approach to do something in the new project, because in the old project, it actually didn't impact at all.

Like the impact on the business was none and this is a good idea, but the way how it was done actually the final conclusion was it doesn't do anything, but we can make it a little bit different. maybe gathering more information about clients from a different source, maybe use it a different way to, to find a new group of clients.

So, there's a lot of, you know things we can do, things we can ask. 

[00:05:53] Darin Newbold: what I hear from you on this is that there's no standard list of, hey, these are the exact questions you have to ask. There's probably a list of key questions that need and must be asked, but what you're asking, really, even as in our show notes here, I'm pointing at it here on my screen, but your first question was, what do you need and almost like a mind map, if you will, of putting that as the circle in the middle and then drawing, drawing your conclusions from that, and then that just spawns, creates opportunities for more questions that, you know, take you down different paths.

But like you said, there's kind of those standard things that you need to know about whether or not they've done a performance audit, the technology behind their, their store and, and the backend, as well as what they want to see on the front end. So all of these things come together when you're doing discovery workshops and the discovery phase, if But, Kind of going down now, maybe a little bit more is we've talked about how this can help with the accuracy of estimates. Can you tell me a little bit more how this helps you and helps the team really get more accurate with our estimates? 

[00:07:03] Anna Krzyżańska: So, as I already mentioned, we have a research and analyze phase in the discovery phase itself.

We also have this phase where we ask a lot of questions, and it brings new perspectives. And those new perspectives, in most cases, brings new requirements. And the more requirements we have, it's actually not something that decides that the project will be huge. The new requirements means that we know more and more.

We know the accuracy of the ballpark will be basically grow because we use the estimation range when we make a ballparks. So the more information we gather, the narrower there is the range becomes. and as a result, we have just, you know, more precise ballpark for our clients.

But I need to add one more thing, is that in many cases our clients expect that they will get one ballpark estimation, right? I think so, like, yeah, I will probably get one number, maybe two numbers. But this is not our assumption right now. When we are making a ballpark, we really want to check a few ways.

Like, we can propose you an MVP version, but in three variants. So you can actually see like what kind of values for what budget you can bring with MVP version because for us, the MVP version can include some requirements that we think they are they should be prioritized to, to bring, for example, more revenue to our client and the client can think like, no, this actually, maybe some of those, you know, positions are okay, Okay.

But I want to also add those things because I know they bring value also, and we know it. We have proof, we can show you, like, this requirement needs to happen in MVP. So, we want to be flexible, we want to show you the options, so you can, budget wise, time wise, and any other wise thing, you can uh, basically choose the best option for you.

And then, for example, what will be after MVP? 

[00:09:10] Darin Newbold: exactly. Yeah. When you're talking MVP, just for, for those, in case you don't know, minimum viable product. So basically the minimum that's required to put together the, basically to bring forward to the world, if you will, in your in your store and in the project, and then what you're saying, Anna is really breaking that down and going from an MVP to then kind of a phase one, phase two, And beyond so that taking this huge undertaking that might be, Hey, we're going to redo someone's store completely from practically from scratch that we have to be careful because trying to do that, there's so many things that we don't even know that we don't know.

so, yeah, doing, doing things this way really does help help with the accuracy of your estimates and helps keep things going. on track, on time, and it creates better expectations for, for the clients. So, What, what are some challenges that, that you faced during a discovery phase 

[00:10:08] Anna Krzyżańska: for sure, there's many people involved in discovery phase. From our side and the client side and in that case it means that it's resource manage that, that the resource management can be hard because you need to manage to communicate between a lot of peoples and make sure that they are on the same ground with everything we.

Um, So that can be a challenge. It is time consuming for sure, because there's a lot of talks that needs to happen. You need to bring your perspective. You need to be open for other perspective people. The perspective of other people's in the project. So, yeah, so it it can be hard to manage all of it.

But in that case it's good to have tools that can help us. There are tools that can help you with discovery phase in that cases, and we use them. So it's a little bit easier. Sometimes it's hard, but it's a little bit easier with those tools. 

[00:10:59] Darin Newbold: Well, very, very good. kind of bringing this all together, what, what do you find are some best practices?

Do 

[00:11:05] Anna Krzyżańska: first engage any kind of person that needs to be engaged right at the beginning of the project. Avoid situations where you, for example, want to discuss something with someone from the marketing team, for example. But you will wait for one month, for example, and you go to that meeting with some agreements with different people.

And then the person on the other side say, no, it cannot work like that. And you need to go back right where you started. So yes, bring the right people at the beginning of the project that the people that you need to know that they agree with, with what you discussed together. The second thing make a huge research about your client.

Like there's a lot of information of any kind of client right now in the internet. So we use it bring those value to your meetings that you know, your client, you know what they are doing. And it also helps you, you know, find their perspective even before the meetings is, you know happen.

I think the next one would be to never think that business requirements are done. Like you, you wrote down business requirements and they will not change. You need to always be open minded to change those requirements, business requirements, because new information can come anytime. And you need to be flexible for that.

[00:12:32] Darin Newbold: what you're talking about is really refining continuously the business requirements and even the estimates. And one of the challenges you mentioned is you needed to talk to marketing. It takes a month to hear from marketing. Well, in that month, all of these things may have changed.

And so the proverbial line in the sand has completely gone and we don't know where it is. So. One of the things, and I think you're about to get to it, is kind of using tools, project management and estimation tools to really help you define and help you draw maybe that line in the sand so that people know, okay, based on the information we know today, this is how this project's going forward.

If it changes, we'll refine, but we've got to, you kind of have to draw a line somewhere, right? 

[00:13:18] Anna Krzyżańska: Yeah, that's how it works. Yeah, I would not say that better, to be honest. Yeah, we have tools, we have tools the tools that are um, in some cases prepared for project management. And the discovery phase is basically a project that we need to do.

So those tools are very helpful. We also have some tools we know that AI is bringing some new values to how we estimate things. So This is something of course new, but I'm pretty sure it's you know, maybe in the half of a year, I will say that I'm only using one tool right now to estimate because everything's automated.

So if you have a tool for estimation, use it as much as you can share it with all the people so everyone can see what's going on with those estimations, with those business requirements. And. think that's also like a very important thing to never forget to ask those questions. I know it's like, I'm repeating myself, but without those questions, we will never be able to bring accuracy we would like to, with the ballpark, with everything including you know all the steps in the discovery phase we are doing.

[00:14:30] Darin Newbold: and often you have to ask the same question multiple times to multiple people so that it's not uncommon to get three different answers or five different answers from three different people. And, and that can be very, very difficult. Well, Anna, I'm going to, I want to kind of just maybe put a little bow around all of this and as we kind of get to the end here.

But the big thing about Really, you know, mastering this and having a great discovery and putting it all together is you've got to have that foundation for the project and do your research Get your clarity with all of the stakeholders. I think one of the things we just got to remember is that this is a constantly refining process where it's continuous, once the project starting, it's like this discovery, this big ball is just continuing to roll and we just refine, change it a little bit, sound about right? 

[00:15:26] Anna Krzyżańska: Yeah. I, Agree, strongly agree. 

[00:15:30] Darin Newbold: Very, very good. Well, Anna, as always, thank you. Thank you so much for being here and thank all of you that are listening. We encourage you to subscribe, check out our podcast anywhere and everywhere on YouTube, Commerce Today, as well as look up Joshua Warren on LinkedIn and you'll find us there with that, we appreciate you. You take care and have a great day. 

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