What happens in a Discovery Workshop?

In attendance at the discovery workshop are you and your team, and from Bad Dinosaur: your account manager, a product manager, a lead designer, and a technical lead (developer). Between these four specialisms, we’ve got all bases covered. The discovery workshop is a morning or afternoon half-day session, with a little comfort break in the middle. 

In the workshop we will ask a lot of questions about you and about your concept. Sometimes we’ll use prompts and exercises to help tease out the information that we need. You can expect a comprehensive session, with a relaxed, collaborative environment. Here’s a rough overview of what will be covered in the session.

We’ll introduce ourselves, get to know you and your team a little better, and cover what we understand about the concept. This is based on information gathered from initial conversations with you and our internal pre-workshop briefing. This helps to make sure that everyone’s on the same page from the get-go.

We’ll dig deep into the users of your digital product: their demographics, their personas, and their journey. We’ll talk about the problem that they have, and how your digital product will fix it. Any insight into your target user will be helpful for us so please share whatever you can. 

We’ll talk about what the current reality looks like. Are there competitors in the field? Are they any good? How are your target users getting around the problem just now? Has there been any research into the area? What’s the background to the concept? This helps us understand where your digital product best fits into the world around it.

We’ll ask you to explain any underlying elements or intellectual property that your digital product will rely on. For example, an algorithm you have created, or a database of information you have curated. This will help us work out how to integrate it with your digital product.

We’ll look at any branding you have in mind for your digital product, what colours, aesthetics, tone of voice, personality, etc. you’d like to incorporate into your concept. This is something that we can help you to develop if you don’t have specific branding in mind. 

We’ll make a recommendation about what technology and solution architecture we think you should use, and we’ll discuss any tech stack preferences or dependencies you might have. We’ll explain our approach to choosing the right tech for your concept, and we’ll do our best to explain everything to you in non-techy speak. 

We’ll discuss the role of Product Owner, what it entails, who in your team would be best suited to it, and what kind of commitment we need (usually an hour or so a week).

We’ll talk about your monetisation strategy (how you’re going to make money from your digital product) and your go-to-market strategy (how you’re going to get users to use it). These topics are important whether you’re building something for the App Stores or for your company to use internally. 

We’ll talk about how you’re planning to fund your project, and what options are available to you. There are several funding options available that you might not have considered, we’ll help you identify opportunities for your industry, sector, and even your location or demographic. 

We’ll give you a more detailed breakdown of how we work as a company, which is called time and materials and what you can expect from the process. It’s important that you know what’s going to happen and when, and that you can buy into our approach as it’s crucial to a successful delivery of your digital product.

We’ll cover any important deadlines and milestones that you have coming up so we can try our best to accommodate them when we propose the schedule for your project proposal. This includes things like funding application deadlines, important investor meetings, launch targets, and even personal time off considerations. 

We’ll talk about ongoing support as part of our partnership, what it looks like, how much it costs, and what level of support you might expect to need post launch. We want you to understand that the relationships we have with our clients are longer term, so if and when you need us in the future, we’ll be there.

Lastly, we’ll go through the flow of the app from start to finish, from every user's perspective. In our experience building digital products, this is the best way to capture every important detail about each individual component. 

After the Discovery Workshop, the Bad Dinosaur team will reflect on what was covered in the session and start to create a proposal. We’ll have a storyboarding session to map out the digital product, componentise all the features and functions, calculate the estimated time and costs, mock up some design ideas, and peer review the proposed solution architecture. This all gets packaged up into a detailed proposal, just like this demo proposal about a dating app for dinosaurs. It takes up to two weeks to complete a proposal after a Discovery Workshop. 

If you'd like to find out if a Discovery Workshop is right for you, and talk about costs and timings, please get in touch with the team today, and get the ball rolling on your project.