Discovery is the discipline of staying in the problem space long enough to be sure the problem is real, frequent and painful before designing anything.
The temptation is always to jump to a solution, because solutions are more fun to discuss and easier to show. Resist for one more conversation than feels comfortable.
In practice: Makerz Network
The problems came from watching their own consultancy at work, not from a survey.
- Producing artefacts took experienced staff around two hours a day, split between working out what was needed and then doing it.
- Human review added at least four more hours before anything could go out.
- Downstream artefacts drifted out of step with the upstream ones they came from.
Alongside that, the firms they knew were already profitable selling services and wanted to scale — free do-it-yourself material at the top of the funnel, paid do-it-yourself products underneath — and had no straightforward way to turn a service into a product.
Three of those four observations are timings. Discovery that produces numbers you can re-measure later is worth considerably more than discovery that produces adjectives.