Project Discovery Stage: Your Bridge Between The Idea and Its Realization

What is Discovery in the Software Development business?

The project discovery phase is a planning stage. It is often the very important prelude to a software project development process and project initiation. Its goal is to gather information about the project, let the team understand the project idea and vision, collect technical requirements, set up a budget, plan the development process and reduce all risks.

Why do you need discovery?
A well-organized discovery process is helpful to:

Better information gathering. Team members can identify project goals. As a result, you will get a more accurate estimate.

Data analysis leads to establishing a product that fulfills its goals successfully, not assumptions on how to organize the process.

Business strategy leads to prevent pitfalls like budget overruns and ensures a higher investment return.

Avoid missed deadlines and costly changes.

Maximize the in-house specialist's impact to control the process quality, or scope creep.

Reduce all risks you can face during the product development.

5 Key Steps in the Discovery Process?

Identifying market and competitor analysis

Market and competitor analysis is the vital part of the discovery phase. Its goal is to give your team and managers a better idea about the working process to be done on different project issues.

Analysis of market demand helps to determine if the end-users need your software product or not. Here, you create benchmarks and set project expectations. That will prevent your software project from failure and closure. More importantly, this helps to understand where the software development team can add more value to your project.

Along with the market, it is necessary to provide competitor research to understand everything about the market for your product and prevent the failure due to extremely high competition. This aims to find out the kind of products your competitors make and the standard of quality that they maintain in a similar niche. Hence, you will understand the pricing ratio and will charge a competitive fee.

Conducting your target audience research

However, the process of making new software needs this part of analysis because of such reasons. First, you need to carry out the research if the audience requires this software product. And second, it helps you to visualize what you have learned and make you a clear vision of what you need to develop.

Traditionally, this research focuses on the information about the user. You need to think about the audience goals and focus on their pain points, tasks they want to solve, questions, and objections the target might have. This will help you to viability of the software product you aim to develop and find out if it has market potential.

Defining business goals, objectives, and requirements

It is hard to succeed in your venture if you are not setting a business goal and are not focused on what you need. You must focus on the defining business goals, objectives, and requirements phase to make an efficient decision according to your future product.

To build a successful product, you need to set clear goals.

This stage is a first step to build full business understanding. It can reduce conflict in a project and identify solutions to succeed stakeholder expectations. Once the initial research has been carried out, we can expect the better understanding of the financial return process in the form of more leads and sales, and boosting the engagement and experience.

Visualization and the future product overview

Once you’ve finalized previous stages, you can start to detail the visualization and the future product overview phase. You can share your ideas with the client, and discuss starting the project. This is the stage where you collaborate closely and plan to proceed further. You set the project timeline and establish core features, detail factors that will influence the project and offer top-notch solutions.

Cost & Time analysis

The establishment of milestones and detailed budget estimations is the critical step. Your business can fail if you don’t have enough money to run it. You can analyze this aspect during the discovery phase and plan the future process that is aimed to secure your budget.

Identify any bottlenecks that may delay the project, detail a budget that highlights all the costs, analyze the resources allocation and things that can lead to problems. It’ll help greatly with client management and further project development.

Benefits of a Discovery Team in Software Development

The most visible mistake with discovery phases is the failure to make everything yourself. You are only going to benefit from the expertise discovery team. The Custom Software Development & Consulting company NOXU has an experienced discovery team ready to help achieve your digital project objectives.

The team is necessary for you because it is a reliable tool that helps create a startup safely, focusing on your ideas, time, and budget. We highlighted 4 areas in which you will get professional help dealing with NOXU during the discovery phase. These are business analysis, UI/UX design, software development, and project management. Here is the detailed overview.

Business Analysis. Brainstorming sessions and interviews in cooperation with the client help to identify project prototyping, and requirements. This stage also includes the breaking down of the IT project into stages and identifying the main aims.

Software Development. The NOXU software developer provides suggestions and technologies, highlights important areas, carries out additional research to make sure the selected tech solutions would be the best for your business.

UI/UX design. This stage consists of UX research, UX wireframes and higher detail mock-ups. This is likely to include competitor analysis aimed to create a better product with easy navigation and intuitive design. A professional team will make wireframes to understand the user experience and mock-up designs of key interface screens to bring the product vision to life and attract investor attention.

Project Management. At this point, you get detailed scheduling of clients meetings, recording of all the project details during meetings and discussions, productive team engagement and explanations of developers solutions.

Project Discovery Results: What You Will Get From NOXU Cooperation

There are several benefits of NOXU cooperation during the discovery phase. It allows you to make the right decision about your future project and also get:

Clickable prototypes

As the product owner, you will get in-depth UX research with clickable prototypes. This is the clear vision of the end product, its main pages, the functionality, and real user flow.

Product specification

You will get market survey results and a structured document with outlines key product requirements.

Time and cost estimation

This study allows them to figure out the detailed estimate. You will get statistics of technical requirements, services specified in hours and pricing.

Recommendations on team composition

Based on the project priorities, they can offer a suitable team of professional designers, software developers, QA, Team Leads & Architects UX/UI designers, and engineers.

Do not rely only on your own experience and knowledge. Don't hesitate to cooperate with a professional Product discovery team to start your project and get excellent results.