How to plan your discovery for enterprise project

Using the Double-Diamond design framework

Three years ago I abandoned the software delivery world. I became a discovery manager full-time at the consulting firm. I was good at pre-sales and discovery with new customers. I liked the job and it left no time for delivery of the solutions. I was in a constant discovery mode for startups and big enterprises across verticals.

My peers and my customers ask me — “How do you do discovery?”. Over time, the pattern had emerged, that I could explain to them the process. Even though each business and a customer is unique, the way you discover how you can help them is the same.

“Customers don’t know what they want!”

I bet, I heard and said this every month of my agile delivery life past 10 years. As an agile team, even though we knew — the client doesn’t know what (s)he wants, we struggled to live with this truth.

We, as engineers, testers, analysts and even project managers, complained about this fact. We avoided it by “managing scope”:

• “locking the sprint” and
• putting inconvenient changes “into the backlog”.

I felt that we — an agile team — was on the opposite side of the table with our customers. We wanted to…