Discovery Sprint
Four weeks for an evidence-based roadmap. No guesswork about what to build next.
Overview
Before writing a single line of code, the most important question is whether you’re solving the right problem. The Discovery Sprint answers that question — giving your team a shared, prioritized direction, while reducing the risk of building the wrong thing at great cost.
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- Length
- 4 weeks
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- Cost
- $50,000
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- Deliverable
- Product Requirements specification (or a Business Requirements Document if that’s your flavor)
What You Get
- Expert product review.
- We evaluate your existing product — or your closest competitors’ — across UX, UI, accessibility, analytics, web performance, security, and technical architecture. We establish a baseline so every subsequent decision is grounded in what is actually happening, not what you assume is happening. 1
- Stakeholder discovery.
- We interview your executive team, subject-matter experts, and customer support staff. This enables us to uncover the decisions already made, the non-negotiable constraints, and the must-haves and nice-to-haves that follow from them. Stakeholder sessions inform us what’s actually feasible given your organization’s context — not just what’s ideal on paper. 2
- Customer / user research.
- We design and run mixed-method research sessions with your users — interviews, usability tests, and / or surveys. We assess product-market fit, identify usability barriers, and map the competitive landscape. 3
- Product requirements document.
- We deliver a clear, prioritized document that captures requirements, defines success metrics, establishes baselines, and sets targets. PRD / BRD can be used as a product specification for design and development, or a feature set for a startup founder. 4
- Project plan.
- We provide to you a roadmap (built and optimized around what we learned in the sprint) with a focus on prioritized features, a realistic timeline, cadence, team roles and skillsets, and resource allocations.
Why It Works
We used the same approach on the Program Pathways Mapper for California’s community college system before moving into design and development.
In this instance, the pre-redesign discovery revealed that student task success was at 39% — well below the 78% industry average — and that the planned new features would have shipped on top of unresolved usability and information architecture problems. Focusing on the fundamentals took the task success rate to 89% post-launch.
Most product organizations skip this step, or compress it to a few stakeholder meetings. In our experience, it remains a crucial step — it aligns everyone and sets expectations for the rest of the project.
Who This is For
The Discovery Sprint is designed for seed-stage founders who are moving toward their first or second build. You have enough confidence to invest in the right direction, but need better clarity and evidence-based validation before you commit.
What’s Next After the Discovery
The Discovery Sprint is a natural on-ramp to the MVP Sprint. Founders who complete the Discovery Sprint with us move into design and development with a solid blueprint — whether they continue working with us, hand it over to an in-house team, or another vendor.
If you are not ready to commit to an MVP, a Concept Sprint helps you create and test a Proof of Concept in only five days.
Footnotes
The Discovery Sprint is optimized for speed and cost-effectiveness.
- Expert product review for one product — yours or your competitors. ↩
- Up to 10 hours of sessions with internal stakeholders. Can be combined into half-day sessions. Multiple stakeholders can participate in each session. ↩
- Up to 10 individual sessions with customers or users. The Discovery Sprint doesn’t include customer recruitment and compenstation, but we can connect you with recruitment specialists once we identify target audience. ↩
- Up to 40 requirements. In our experience, idenitifying a large number of requirements may result in a distracting and potentially unrealistic product roadmap. ↩