Product Discovery
The discovery phase is a crucial first step in software development. We can say that there are two stages to it. First of all, you need to discover what you want to develop, for whom and why. This is about defining target group and buyer personas (user personas), market research and competitive analysis and building a business plan. You should also verify the idea on the market using the simplest and non-development MVP tools (I described in another article what you can do to test your concept, so feel free to check it out).
The second part of “discovering” the project is aimed at understanding the project by your software development company. They need to understand your conclusions, approach and goals to help you transfer the idea into a ready-to-be-coded app.
Now, let’s investigate both aspects of discovering your app-to-be.
Market Research & Customer Analysis
Let’s say you have an amazing idea to create an online dating app with geosocial networking features. Sounds great, huh? Yes, but somebody already came up with the same idea and created Tinder, which is a highly successful working software.
Competitive Analysis
Does that mean that you should give up on your dreams of creating such an app? No, but it means you need to do proper competitive research and offer something more than your competitors did. Maybe you would like to make your app culture-sensitive? You might want to create an app that helps arrange marriages or allows you to remain anonymous when chatting.
Think about what could make your application stand out from the crowd. What is its unique value proposition that you can offer to the target group?
To determine that, you need to define who your competitors are and analyse their approaches and activities (like reading comments on their social media platforms, opinions on the Internet, or taking a look at their landing pages to define what’s missing in their apps).
Define and Understand the Target Audience’s Needs
Moreover, users may download your app, but if you neglect their specific needs and preferences, it will remain unused or soon to be abandoned (or deinstalled). To gain users’ loyalty, put tremendous attention to their needs. That allows you to improve the quality of your software project and influence the final app’s success.
For example, if you create a social media app for young people, who value appearance as well as usability, they will probably care if the app’s UI is aesthetic enough. On the other hand, if you build an app for elderly people, simplicity and an intuitive user interface will be more important to them than aesthetics (or they might even have a different sense of it!).
By investing time and effort to deeply understand your app’s users and their challenges, you can provide them with the right features, solutions and functional capabilities. This approach helps you avoid costly changes and minimises the risk of making wrong decisions in the future. Ultimately, investing in the discovery stage sets the foundation for a successful and user-centric app development process. You can read more about this in the articles about buyer personas and building a go-to-market strategy.
I would suggest that if you can’t make your application useful for users and stand out on the market, it’s worth pushing the idea aside rather than blowing the budget for an application that might not conquer the market.
Idea Validation
When you know what you want to build and for whom, you should test your idea with real people before you invest a penny in creating the app. Here the MVP comes in handy.
MVP stands for a Minimum Viable Product and, contrary to popular beliefs, it’s not the simplest version of your app. It’s rather an approach or tool to verify an idea than building a “product”. There are many MVP types you can use to validate your concept – it could be an offline service to assess the demand for your solution, a short promotional video or a landing page with a subscription form. Building a clickable prototype or the simplest app are just two of many other ways you can verify your idea with real users. For more information check my article on what is MVP and why you need it.
The feedback you collect will help you decide whether it’s reasonable to invest money in building the app (even after a few modifications) or whether it would be better to abandon the idea (as people do not need such an app). You’ll also gain some insight into how much people are willing to pay for your app, which is useful when it comes to the next step – building a business plan.
I highly suggest you run such MVP-driven research before you decide to move on with the app development.
Business Plan
Having all the knowledge, you can create a business plan and choose the monetisation model for your app. That will also give you some insights into the income you might expect during the first months after the release (based on some assumptions, of course).
At this stage, you should also be aware of how much money you can spend on app development. That will help you with cost estimation and timeline, which are crucial when it comes to negotiations with a software development company.
I explained some aspects of budgeting in my article about how to estimate software development costs (you can also check the costs of building an MVP). Here, I just want to encourage you to share your budget amount openly with the developer as its role is to help you allocate it in the way that will bring you the best value. Keep in mind that it’s in your contractor’s interest to make your app successful (and your business growing) because that means long-term and fruitful cooperation for both sides.
Requirements Analysis
When you know what you want to build (even if it’s still a blurry idea), you can start looking for a contractor (you can check Mike’s suggestions on how to choose the best one). Together, you will transform the idea into a well-planned project.
This stage is crucial for the people you hire to understand your business, goals and end-users. They need to be onboarded into what you are about to build to help you make the most of it through software design and software creation.
Don’t be surprised if the development team will start challenging you at this point. They should question your ideas and confront them with the requirements during workshops (at least, we do that!). The team will also likely try to test your risk management and see how well you’ve prepared for any unforeseen events. Do not take it personally. It’s for the sake of your project so that it meets your and your users’ specific expectations, but also legal requirements.
At this stage, you and your development partner also have to determine your app features and functionalities precisely. You need to define the actions a user should perform to complete a specific task. To do that, the development team will create user stories and user flows.
User Stories
User stories are brief descriptions of a feature or functionality from the perspective of a user. They are based on user personas and describe who the user is, what the user wants to do, and why they want to do it. User stories are short and written in a simple language without going into details.
An example of a user story can be: “As a bank customer, I want to see a list of recent transactions to keep track of my spending” or “As a restaurant owner, I want to create ads on the internet to attract more customers.”
User stories help to identify the differences between the users’ needs. Notice that one persona group usually needs a few user stories. So if you work on your app and you’ve created six personas, you can end up having about twenty or more user stories.
User Flows
User flows are diagrams or visual representations of a user’s steps to complete a specific task or goal (the ones you’ve defined as user stories). They help identify different paths a user can take and highlight potential roadblocks or issues.
In other words, it is a kind of graphically presented path that must be followed to, for example, buy a product in an online store.
The user flow might include steps, such as selecting a product, adding it to the cart, entering shipping and billing information, and completing the purchase. The user flow might also show alternative paths, such as if the user decides to remove an item from the cart or if there is an error during the checkout process. Overall, user flows help the team identify potential issues and ensure that users can easily complete their goals.
Software Architecture & Technical Requirements
It is also the time to think about software architecture. When creating software architecture, you need to make choices and compromises that software developers call trade-offs.
Looking for the Perfect Balance
They must carefully consider various factors and requirements and suggest the most suitable solutions based on the project’s goals, constraints, and priorities. It is all about balancing competing objectives such as performance versus scalability, flexibility versus simplicity, and development time versus maintainability of the actual software.
The key lies in finding the right balance that aligns with the project’s specific needs and constraints, ensuring that the chosen trade-offs lead to an architecture that is effective, sustainable, and meets the desired goals of the software system. For example, if you want thousands of users to actively use the app at the same time, your infrastructure must be prepared for that to create a smooth experience in the next phase.
Integrations
If you need integration with other tools or APIs (that enables individual applications to work with one another) this is the time to incorporate these requirements into your project. Let’s assume that your goal is to create a travel app where users can buy airline tickets. Now you have to figure out how to integrate it with the airline system. Will your app handle the purchase or will it be managed by a third-party solution? How will you manage the confirmation or issues?
Keep in mind that depending on how custom the integration is and how niche the system you need to integrate with is, the higher the price.
Security and Law
Besides that, your development team determines what input and output data is necessary and how you will handle data privacy and security regulations during and after the software creation. It is also time to establish a secure hosting environment (on-premises, cloud-based or hybrid, but most of our solutions are cloud ones and serverless) and find the ideal server size and capacity.
Project Scoping & Cost Estimation
All the arrangements we’ve done (with all the user flows and stories, core features specifications and software architecture) are now given to our clients in the form of product documentation. It’s important to make sure that the client’s idea and vision are understood by the contractor and defined well enough in order to start implementing it. There’s another benefit to providing the client with such documentation. Having it, a client is not bound to this particular contractor; they can take it to another company if they are not satisfied with the cooperation.
Defining the scope, we also create a long-term plan for project growth, considering future features and scalability of the actual software. However, keeping the big picture in mind, we focus on paying attention to short-term details. This approach allows us to start working on the project right away even without having the full scope figured out. We can adapt to changing requirements and incorporate feedback, ensuring a successful software development process.
The Basis for Estimation
The scope also leads us to the costs. As I explained in my article about estimations, it is impossible to assess app development costs properly if the requirements are not precisely defined. For this reason, going through the discovery process is the best way to gain reliable insight into the costs. However, based on my experience, I can assure you that your requirements will change during the process and so will the final price. Therefore, it’s good to remember that the costs are approximate and assessed based on the current state of things.
What is more, since the app development doesn’t end with its deployment, you should be aware that some additional costs may occur. You have to take into account the costs of maintaining the application or adding new features. Although you can check how to estimate app development costs in my article, it’s always good to ask a software development agency for a reliable estimation and requirement analysis.
The Way to Raise Funds
It’s also a good moment to think about how to acquire external investors or to revalidate whether you want to jump into this investment at all. Having well-defined product documentation and a detailed scope will allow you to convince investors that you have an innovative and solid project planned that is worth helping financially. So the discovery part is not only an investment in the project but also a chance to get funding.
Getting your app funded and attracting investors can undoubtedly be a challenging and time-consuming process. Investors are cautious with their money and want to ensure it is well-invested that’s why you need to be prepared before you start pitching. In our article, we have gathered various strategies that can help you get substantial resources for your app development and guide you through the stages of startup funding.
Marketing Activities
Now, you can think about a preliminary deployment plan, marketing activities and announcements. Don’t skip the marketing part – it helps to ensure that your software product will be successful in the market and people will find it easily.
What’s better than a well-driven campaign while the team is still developing software? You don’t waste any of your precious time and your project can become recognizable before being finished.
Discovery is an Investment, Not a Cost
Remember that, according to Agile principles, no stage, including the discovery phase, is considered “fully” completed and may be revisited in later stages according to the project’s needs.
Our reliable software development team’s goal is to comprehend our client’s business and technical requirements as well as to understand how the digital product can address users’ needs. Thinking about these aspects in the early stage of development will help you save some money in the long term and define the direction the project team should follow. If you still feel lost in the discovery phase, feel free to read my article about it!
