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Discovery has a reputation as the phase where an agency bills for meetings. That reputation is earned whenever discovery produces conversation and no documents. A discovery phase that is doing its job hands you five things, and you should ask for them by name before agreeing to a build.
One: a written problem statement
One paragraph, agreed by both sides, describing what is not working commercially and what it currently costs. Not a feature list. If nobody can state the problem in a paragraph, the scope that follows will drift, because there is nothing to test it against.
Two: the measure of success
A single number with a baseline and a target. Cost per lead, quotation turnaround, checkout completion rate, adoption at ninety days. One number, agreed in writing, reported against monthly.
If a project has more than two success metrics, it has none. Everything becomes defensible and nothing is falsifiable.
Three: a scope document with explicit exclusions
What is included matters less than what is written down as excluded. The exclusions are where mid-project arguments come from, so they belong in the document before either party has spent anything. Ours lists what we are not building, in plain language.
Four: flows or wireframes for the critical paths
Not a full design. The two or three journeys that carry the commercial outcome — enquiry, checkout, booking — shown as screens or steps you can walk through and object to. Objections at this stage cost nothing. The same objection after build costs weeks.
Five: a fixed price and timeline
How to judge a discovery phase
Ask for these five before you commission the build. If an agency can produce them, the risk in your project has already dropped substantially. If they cannot, the discovery was a series of meetings, and you are about to fund a build against an unwritten specification.
Discovery is also where we occasionally conclude that the work should not go ahead — that the problem is smaller than the proposed solution, or sits somewhere we cannot help. That outcome is a good use of the phase, not a failure of it.
Ask us for the five artefacts. If another agency has already produced them, we will review them with you for free.
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