Mastering Discovery for Website Project Success

Overview

Congratulations! You got the green light to redesign your website, build your eCommerce platform or web app.

And while you’re excited to get started, you can’t shake this uneasy feeling because website projects are big. They’re complicated. Every department in the company has a stakeholder.

These questions keep flooding your mind:

How are you going to make everyone happy?

How are you going to finish on time? What is the schedule?

How are you going to finish on budget? What’s a reasonable budget?

To top it off, you read that close to 90% of all projects fail to meet expectations. It shouldn’t be this hard.

We agree.

We’ve spent over 15 years leading hundreds of technology and design projects for startups, agencies and corporations of all sizes and types.

It bothered us to see smart people struggle to launch a project, needlessly wasting money and opportunity as time passed. Worse, was watching some build the wrong website or application entirely (resulting in a low or negative ROI) because they started off with incomplete information gathered in a bad (or you can say ineffective) discovery session.

We learned that all successful projects started with great Discovery workshops.

During these workshops, stakeholders discussed goals, gathered key information and provided the project team with the scope, budget and timeline needed to succeed.

The purpose of this Discovery Guide is to help you maximize the value of your Discovery Workshop. It’s to provide an adaptable tool you can use to get projects started right.

Here’s what’s covered

How to align your team on desired outcomes and what success looks like

What questions to ask your customers during interviews

What information your development team needs to build the right application

How to give good direction for design to create a remarkable experience

What are the business processes, governance and workflows needed

And much more!

This guide is over 10 years in the making. It’s been refined, polished and battle-tested inside companies like Lifetime Fitness, Wake Forest University, MHS, Inc., SkyGolf and others. It will save you countless hours and reduce risk exponentially.

Inside you'll find the exact (50+ page) workbook we use to run a discovery workshop for any website or eCommerce product.

As a bonus, we've added our customer interview questionnaire. Use it to find out from your customer's needs and wants from your website.

Walk into any project with confidence today, knowing you have the tools to master discovery for project success.

Who Developed this Guide?

Marty Balkema

Marty is an experienced professional services and software development leader with a proven track record of helping customers leverage technology to execute on their business goals. Bringing with him 20 years of experience, Marty has led teams and projects across a wide range of industries including manufacturing, parts distribution, agriculture, large government, public education, and commercial software. He uses a customer-focused approach working with clients to discover their vision, break down complex problems, develop a plan, and organize a team to deliver a solution.

His brand experience includes Mitsubishi Caterpillar Forklifts America, Voya Financial, Life Fitness, FDA.gov, Member Advantage Mortgage, Burke Porter Group, Spartan Motors USA, Haworth, Johnson Controls and more.

David Horne

For over 15 years, David has created and executed business strategies, marketing campaigns and content for startups, agencies, enterprise and consumer product companies. During that time he’s gained experience in numerous skills within marketing, advertising, web design and product development.

Some of his brand experience includes work for SkyGolf, The Golf Channel, Weaver Investment Company, Smirnoff, Universal Furniture, Discovery Learning Inc., DC Comics/Warner Bros., Wake Forest University, High Point University, USO of NC, JCPenny, IFB Solutions (formerly Winston-Salem Industries of the Blind) and others.