Project Discovery Phase Checklist: What Not to Miss

You've got a revolutionary product idea. You know it has every chance to succeed and deliver since your team has gone through the proof of concept phase, you know your potential users and have confirmed that the market is big enough to take a shot at building the solution. You can't wait to get development started, and yet the smartest move would be to begin with thorough preparation for the project.

The thing is that product development isn't something you'd like to approach with spontaneous decision-making. I mean, would you renovate your house without a detailed plan? And if you did jump at the bait of enthusiasm, would the renovation go smoothly? Probably not.

Attempting to figure things out along the way usually leads to a dead end or, at the very least, takes you on a route filled with detours, excessive spending, and wasted time. So if you're sure that your budget isn't elastic, that your resources are worth saving, and that you'd want a worry-free product launch, then the least you can do is get prepared. On this page, you'll find a handy project planning phase checklist we've put together for you, overviewing the product discovery phases in detail.

Why Not to Skip the Discovery Phase of Product Development

The discovery phase of a project could seem like a useless waste of time. In reality, that's an illusion. Skipping it won't be a shortcut that'll get you to the development stage faster. On the contrary, you'll likely miss key requirements, and stumble upon roadblocks that'll lead to do-overs and wasted development time on seeking workarounds.

It's like starting to bake an intricate dessert only to find out somewhere almost halfway down in the process that you're lacking the ingredients, equipment, or skills to do it. You won't be happy with a less-than-perfect dish. Frustration? Big time. The answer? Don't skip the prep work.

Bottom line: lack of clarity usually means delayed launches, expensive revisions, costly setbacks, and budget overruns. If you think about it, two weeks isn't that much if the result is a clear blueprint for the entire project, marking how exactly you'll build the MVP or larger-scale product and the rules everyone agrees on.

Investing time and resources in the discovery phase helps you:

• minimize the chances of project failure;
• clarify your vision and define project goals;
• set realistic expectations;
• align teams on what should be done and how;
• select the core features to focus on;
• line out the technical requirements;
• establish the project's scope;
• reduce the likelihood of scope creep;
• identify and address potential challenges;
• create a well-defined roadmap and detailed plan;
• optimize the use of time, personnel, and financial resources.

Next, we'll provide a project management discovery phase template, giving detailed descriptions of what to take care of during every step.

Product Development Discovery Phase Checklist

What are the main product discovery steps you can't miss out on? Feel free to use the following section as a project kickoff checklist to guide your pre-development planning phase.

Step 1: Gather Your Team, Discuss the Ideation Stage Results

Perhaps only a part of your team was involved in the ideation phase or you were doing market research solo altogether. But when the time comes to prepare for development, you need some more specialists to join you in the brainstorming and planning process, as this is the only way to get other perspectives and lessen bias. Otherwise, you'll be trying to force together random pieces of your "jigsaw puzzle" project without even seeing the big picture.

As such, it makes sense to give the designer a say. This person can conduct a review of analogous solutions that are out there and notice their usability strengths and flaws that can be implied when working on the future product or MVP design. Equally, a tech lead or developer should also have a voice as technology-related calls can really affect the overall project budget.

The exact number of people you might need could vary depending on the project, yet having a versatile crew of up to ten people is a median. With various specialists onboard from the start, you'll foster collaboration and mutual understanding early on with everyone on the same page regarding the whys and hows.

So, the first task to check off on this product discovery template is to gather these people for a discussion. Together go over the main points that are known after initiation. For instance, this can include the problem statement, some key market figures, and other essentials you found out when doing research. Use collaboration tools to jot down your early results.

Step 2: Zoom in on the Target Audience and Competitors

You most probably already know a thing or two about your target audience if you've done your user research. If you decided to take a shot at bringing this product idea to life, you confirmed that the problem exists, what the pain points that people face are, and that there's a big enough market size for the solution to stand a chance and make it worth building.

At this point, you should look at your potential customers from another standpoint. Take the time to make user personas or proto personas, which are key profiles of your target audience with their demographics, needs, and challenges. Then create a few use cases to better understand whose interests you're attempting to cater to.

Another good way to do that is to create user stories, marking what a certain role is supposed to do with your solution and how it should work on the customer's end. This will help you map the user journey and better envision how people will interact with your solution.

Conducting competitive analysis is equally important. You want to find out everything you can: their offering, pricing strategy, selling techniques, marketing tactics, voice, and so on. The more you know about their strengths and weak spots, the better your chances for successful first release.

Step 3: Form the Project Vision

Now that you know about the existing problems, who has them, and which other solutions exist, you have to settle on the solution you're planning on producing. What are the goals of your project?

Continue moving through the project discovery phase checklist by writing out what you aim to achieve, ensuring that it's doable. Clarify the purpose of what you're doing and which problems the solution should tackle. For preciseness, make the goals time-bound and, ideally, measurable. If your goals are clear, this will provide the team with direction, helping you mark progress at various stages of the product development life cycle.

What is your unique selling proposition? What should make your product stand out? What is your UI/UX concept? Jot down the basics to use as a trampoline for further product decisions.

Step 4: Put Down the Possible Risks

Clarify the risks as well. Of course, there could be unforeseen complexities that lead to delays or extra spending, but you can prepare for many scenarios. Are there potential resource limitations or unexpected costs? Can the team bump into technical challenges or other roadblocks? What can disrupt your timelines?

Document various points that can hinder the project's development or the product's success. If possible, note the strategies or ways to mitigate or address them so that project execution goes smoother.

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Step 5: Prioritize the Features and Finalize the Scope

Regardless of whether you're going for a minimum viable product or a more complex or large version, starting with the core feature set is a best practice. If you don't work on feature prioritization and don't single out the "must-haves" for the first release, you'll end up with a never-ending project where you keep on adding things that weren't planned for initially but might be redundant for the first release. To say the least, this bloats the budget and extends the timeline, so you need to set clear boundaries for the project.

Which features absolutely have to be present for your product vision to come to life? You can list all the feature ideas you have and sort them to pinpoint those that need to be taken care of first of all. These basic and fundamental features will form the first chunk of your project or MVP scope.

Overview each one and ask: "Does it directly address the pain points our product is solving?" Don't forget that each feature takes time and money to build, so if you're on a budget, stripping the scope down to the crucial things is probably a good idea.

The rest of the non-essential features and bells can be added during consequent iterations or dropped altogether (but put them down in a backlog so you don't lose them). For instance, if you want to integrate AI into the solution, you must decide whether this technology is integral for your product to portray your vision or if it's a "good-to-have". If it's a fundamental technology that makes your product become what it is, it should be added to the prioritized scope, whereas if you want to use it for an AI chatbot to help with customer support, this might be handled at the later stages.

Step 6: Make Vital Tech Decisions

Deciding on the tech stack and other technology-related aspects is among the most important product discovery phases. It's like choosing the building materials for a house, you'll need the best bricks, lumber, and tiles (or at least those you can afford). So it makes sense to hear out experienced developers who know the ropes and can advise on the optimal way to build the product from the foundation and up.

Make decisions regarding the programming languages and frameworks that are suitable. They should be selected not only based on popularity but also on what the development team has experience with and what will allow the solution to scale in the future.

Look at the functional requirements from a technical standpoint. Which databases and tools do you need? Which system requirements and infrastructure will be best? All of these questions imply a lot of time to answer since you should look at the long-term, not what's just enough for the "immediate" first release.

Furthermore, turn to the CTO or developers to consult about how exactly each feature or part of the product should be built. Is everything you have in mind technically feasible within the current project timeline? The thing is that not everything has to be coded from scratch. Custom coding is the right way to go for the unique parts of your solution, while some basics like user login and authentication or a payment gateway can be added to the product by tweaking third-party integrations. This can definitely streamline development and save time and resources, yet should be planned in advance during the software product discovery phase.

Similarly, some solutions or integrations should be hooked to the system either way. This regards security means safeguarding the system from hacks or tools like Mixpanel for data analytics to help you collect data and track metrics and user behavior when the product goes live. Make sure to mark these too.

Step 7: Create a Project Blueprint with a Timeline

You know the deliverables and the finalized scope, so now you can move on to making a product specification. Documenting the essentials like the most critical features, requirements, and technical details is advisable so that all parties can have a source of truth to turn to.

What is the estimated project duration? What are the key deadlines? Preferably, you're aiming to also have a concise MVP roadmap that outlines the project milestones. A roadmap is essential for keeping a software development project on track, besides, it makes it easier to manage team workloads and track progress.

To make a timeline, split the work into major phases with distinct deliverables and key tasks for each. Ensure the outputs are tangible and the durations of the phases are clear. Many teams use the sprint-based approach when a tangible result is delivered every two weeks, but you can use other intervals.

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Step 8: Decide on the Workforce

How many people do you need? You must have the right experts involved in the project to ensure that it's executed effectively. Assess the skills, roles, and workforce necessary to bring the idea to life. Shortlist how many specialists you need, for example, two front-end developers, two back-end developers, one QA engineer, one UX/UI designer, and one project manager.

And how are you planning on hiring them? If you don't have the staff to take on the project or notice skill gaps, you might need to revise other hiring options to assemble the team. There are many pros and cons of both in-house and outsourced teams, sometimes even hybrid augmentation of external specialists is the way out, so it's best to think it through during discovery.

Which areas of responsibility are there? Who will approve the milestones? Either way, lining out the team composition and noting who is in charge of what won't hurt. When people know who the decision-makers are and who to turn to for a specific matter, misunderstandings decrease.

Step 9: Work on the UX/UI Design

This step can be taken care of earlier in parallel with other product discovery steps. However, designers can start working on the early versions of the product. Note the information architecture fundamentals and how content and features should be structured and navigated within the product to ensure a logical flow.

Next, what do you want it to look like? Before you move on to visualization, you have to start with at least a basis. Gather some references, work on UX discovery research, mark what you like, what you'd want to adopt and customize for your solution.

Then, proceed with UX wireframing to visualize the structure of a product in a simple way. Play around with the layouts, element placement, and screens.

When that's done, your team can continue with product prototyping. Clickable, interactive prototypes are great for testing. They let you spot gaps, inconsistencies, and navigation flaws to improve the user journey, make it more intuitive, and avoid costly design changes later in the project. The designers will later apply all of this groundwork to make final mockups which developers will then use when coding and piecing together the product. 

Step 10: Calculate the Budget

Now that you know how many people you'll need, how you'll assemble the team in terms of hiring paths, and which technology you'll use, calculate your budget as a final step of the discovery phase checklist. A well-prepared budget ensures that the project can proceed without financial interruptions and provides clarity on funding requirements. So, how much will design, development, and testing cost?

Your calculations should include lots of things like salaries based on the hourly rates and the duration of the milestones. These should probably be clear by now from your earlier determined milestones and project estimations.

Don't leave out the ongoing operational costs and expenses on things like fees for:

• tools (project management, communication, design, data analytics, and so on);
• third-party integrations;
• cloud hosting;
• data storage;
• other external services and necessary infrastructure components.

Some services come at a fixed price, while others require monthly fees or are billed on a pay-per-use basis, so you have to factor in these peculiarities as well. Also, add in a "safety net" chuck to your budget in case you face unexpected turns. Setting aside contingency funds of about 10 to 20% is a best practice.

Final Thoughts on Software Product Discovery

Way too many things can push a project over budget: integration challenges that weren't considered, scope creep, or anything else. Suddenly, teams find themselves wondering how their initial estimate has nothing to do with reality, as the deadlines are far gone and the costs exceed all expectations.

In the end, if handled properly, the discovery phase is a small investment with a big outcome. It should precede product delivery to bring more value, laser-focus the team, and reduce risks. By following the steps described in our project discovery phase template, you can greatly enhance the chances of delivering a successful product within budget and on time, as discovery promotes effective utilization of time, work hours, and financial assets. By setting a team down and actually planning the details of the development work ahead, you'll get a clear and consistent plan with a smart set of optimal and scalable technologies, keeping the team focused. 

If you think that you need a hand with any of the steps we described on this page, no worries! You can count on Upsilon's expert team to help you with the discovery phase services. The stage typically takes two weeks and, as a result, you get a detailed battle plan for project execution, covering all the essentials and hard parts like technology and budget. And if you need a team to bring the development plan to life, don't be shy to contact us as well!