Disclaimer: 1-2 weeks of analysis and testing your main idea:) ART of stARTing.

Nowadays, the market for products and solutions is very competitive, and financial and human resources are limited. To avoid mistakes and save time, product companies are increasingly resorting to a discovery phase (DPh) before starting a product development stage.

The project discovery phase is the process of gathering and analyzing information about a project, its market and potential customers. This allows your company to gain a comprehensive and deep understanding of your goals, scope and limitations.

This service will tell you how to start product development in order to achieve short-term and strategic goals. As a rule clients get the following deliverables after DPh:

• Vision and scope;
• Estimation duration;
• Technical architecture;
• Clickable Prototype.

However, this is often not enough, and we recommend adding testing of the main idea on real users for 1 or 2 weeks sprint. ITSDev team brainstorms on various solutions to the assigned tasks, makes the first prototype and tests it on potential customers. Then we collect feedback on the prototype, analyze them, make corrections if needed, and again test it on users. Learn more about the discovery phase steps.

The most important thing is that you can do this phase BEFORE putting together a development team and quickly test your idea. Perhaps the results will surprise you so much that you will change the entire concept or take it with even more enthusiasm, because you will have feedback from real people on your hands.

It is especially important to have the DPh where the cost of an error is either too high or unacceptable in principle. The latter includes for example all products in the medical field. The first one is all hardware products due to the following reasons:

Full-cycle development includes hardware, firmware and software development and as a consequence, all experiments are very expensive.
In future refactoring will be much more difficult, since everything will depend on the characteristics of the existing hardware.
MVP development is much longer and more expensive than MVP in software products and so on.

Therefore, based on the above, a timely and professionally delivered discovery phase will help to avoid mistakes and focus on what is really important to your company from the stART.