Discovery Phase Software Development Projects
PrimalCom recognizes that 50% of small businesses and startups lack precise insights into their audience's needs. From conceptualizing a business idea, uncertainty often surrounds the choice of business model, potential risks, monetization strategies, and cost-effective product testing. The software development discovery phase and project management discovery phase play pivotal roles in providing comprehensive guidance at every stage of development.
What is the significance of the Discovery Phase?
A meticulous examination led by a team of thoughtful experts can refine your concept into a well-defined product vision or revitalize your existing project. This process is commonly referred to as the product discovery phase in software development.
Through it, you gain invaluable insights into the ideal design, features, and services that will attract your users.
Identifying your business strategy
Careful budget planning to avoid the loss
Predicting and reducing risks and roadblocks
Defining goals and scope for the MVP, and well-developed UX prototype
Finalizing your vision, validating the idea, and ensuring the market fit
Building the ground for extra funding for your project
The process of the discovery phase for software development
Always:
- Project manager
- Business Analyst
- Account Manager
Sometimes:
- Team Lead
- Developer
- Designer
- States the problem and clarify the value proposition
- Elicits the Business and User’s needs
- Defines:
- Persona-based on stakeholder’s assumptions
- Product Vision and Roadmapping
- Minimum Viable Product goals (hypotheses) and scope definition
- Looks at your product from the user’s perspective
- Proposes the Solution Architecture
- Designs UX prototype for the MVP
- Estimates the MVP release scope
Depending on the project: from 1 week to 2 months.
- Never-ending scope creeps
- Climbing cost
- Missed deadlines
- The project doesn’t meet your expectations
What are the discovery phase deliverables?
What deliverables does a discovery phase bring in the end?
And here’s what you will get after a discovery phase:
1. Product Overview
- Problem statement
- Key functionality required for MVP
- Business objectives
2. Architecture Decisions For Product Implementation
- Onclusion on product’s interoperability with other tools and systems
- Product’s physical structure overview
3. UI/UX Concept
- Product prototype representing the concept of user’s interaction with the product
4. To-Do List
- Product backlog
- First release (MVP) sized backlog
Why should you trust Primalcom with your discovery phase?
At Primalcom, we offer more than just exceptional software development; we bring credible expertise to the table. Our team of technology and business enthusiasts is driven by tangible results. Leveraging both project management and software development discovery phases, we excel in developing cutting-edge products. Our approach involves thinking outside the box and implementing creative user-centric practices like design thinking workshops and design Google sprints. In essence, we deliver innovative, valuable, and thoroughly tested solutions that align with end-users’ needs and desires.
Our Industry Expertise
At Primalcom, our software discovery phase services cater to a wide range of industries and project ideas during the initial stages of project planning and development. Whether you require competitive analysis, project vision clarification, technical requirement definition, or a streamlined path to project success, our discovery phase services are tailored to meet your needs. While our primary focus lies in FinTech, Retail, Real Estate, we also boast extensive experience in executing the discovery stage for industries such as IoT, AgroTech, HealthTech, MarTech, Entertainment, and beyond.
Frequently Asked Questions
It is believed, that discovery phase for a software project is needed only for project’s success of startups and small businesses. Well, that is not a whole truth. Primalcom experiences in software development and discovery phase service for more than 5 years now, so we know some things that are not commonly spread.
First of all, you need to know that major target audience of software discovery phase services are startups and small companies. Yet, here come breaking news. Big companies also use this service during project development. Why so? Because using the discovery stage you can define the project scope, create a project roadmap, conduct proper market research and competitor analysis, grabbing some valuable ideas for UX/UI or product architecture.
Secondly, software development projects are impossible to tailor without software requirements specification (tech requirements, functional requirements, overall project requirements, etc.), clear vision of development process and project goals. Discovery phase helps to get a clear vision on business goals, create a development plan and align it with team composition, define scope of work and tech stack.
Last, but not least. You may skip creation of clickable prototype, jumping to MVP or POC, but you can’t do it without cost estimate, design concept (UX/UI) or competitors research. You now may tell that business analysis could deal with it too. Yes, it can. If we’re not talking about completely new software projects and products on utterly unknown markets. That actually is the most common point for big corporations to rely on the discovery phase of software development.
So the answer is simple. Anyone who needs it may benefit from discovery phase service for software development.
Regarding our experience as a development company, the answer is: it depends. It always depends on the needs of future software (software requirements specification), project scope, and business goals. Usually, next comes the design stage and then the development team, solution architects, QA’s and DevOps engineers start doing their job.
If we get deeper, after the project discovery phase, we’re reevaluating and making a decision whether we’re settling the matter. Is the team composition perfect? Did we chose a technology stack that fits well enough to our needs and may guarantee scaling and project’s success? Are we good with planned development costs?
If you’re dealing with large and long-run software projects, consider including business analysts into the team. Project managers could deal with requirements management, but assuring project’s success requires constant analysis of context and solution reflection.
Discovery phase service for a software project usually requires four experts – business analyst, developer, UX/UI designer, and project manager. All those are needed to properly and comprehensively estimate project needs. If you start software development with open eyes and clear vision it commonly leads to project’s success.
If we’re talking about people involved in the project discovery phase, the list is wider. For example, you will need a company representative or even a few. That could be a CEO or CTO, project manager or product owner.
If you’d like to get to know more about discovery phase service for software development, don’t hesitate to call us!
There is no fixed discovery phase price, as each technical solution is unique, and the cost of services depends on the project’s complexity. If you’d like to find out the approximate price for discovery phase services, you may use our Estimator. Whether you’re interested in the detailed calculation, call us and receive a free estimate and consultation on discovery services.
Let’s discover the primary outcomes of the software discovery phase service:
- Well-designed product requirements and project scope
- Clearly defined goals and objectives
- Improved project management
- Decisions based on analytics results, not hypotheses
- Higher and precisely-calculated ROI after product launch
- Higher user satisfaction and experience
- Avoid unnecessary spendings
If you’re interested, plan a talk with our expert now!