Recently updated on August 15, 2025
The discovery phase of a software project is a complicated process that includes market research, systematization of a customer’s requirements, analysis of the product’s relevance and viability, estimation of the development costs, and often, creation of the MVP and visual demos.
Our experience with various projects demonstrates that the discovery phase of a project in software development is not just a pleasant bonus but a powerful tool that grants a lot of advantages.
This article is aiming to examine what is the discovery phase of a project and its relevance following the structure below:
1. Understanding the Discovery Phase and Its Importance?
2. Key Benefits of the Discovery Phase
3. Essential Stages of the Discovery Phase
4. Who Must be Involved in the Software Development Discovery Phase?
5. Pitfalls of the Project Discovery Phase Process
6. Conclusion
7. FAQ
So what is the discovery phase? The discovery phase is a term that speaks for itself: to discover, to make the unknown – known and the invisible – visible.
In the discovery phase in project management, the very first goal is to determine the optimal architecture and functionality of a future system, defining what is redundant and what is essential to a project in a way that will satisfy stakeholders’ vision. This is where experience and knowledge make a big difference.
The discovery phase is the first step of the project development cycle, it comes before the first line of code is written. It helps you to find the most efficient and cost-effective solution to your business needs and to come up with the full system design architecture, interfaces, and data to meet specific requirements.
If you’re wondering if you should consider the discovery phase for your project, try to find yourself in the list below:
The discovery phase of a project can provide you with measured human, time, and financial resources that your project requires. Without such analysis, the risk of unexpected expenses increases.
Regular communication and engaging in in-depth discussions from the beginning of the development life cycle ensures a full understanding of the goals, expectations, and resources of the project. Skipping this first crucial discovery phase can lead to missed deadlines and extensions of product delivery.
During the discovery stage of the project, you are able to identify opportunities for differentiation, understand market trends, refine your product strategy, and perform end-user needs assessment. By skipping this step, you are increasing the risk to create a product that will not fit into the market.
At Kindgeek, the product discovery phase is divided into two stages.
In the problem analysis stage, we focus on understanding your business pains, stakeholder and user needs, and product expectations to elicitate requirements. In the problem-solving stage, we delve into architecture design, and create user flows and UI/UX designs that align with your goals. We utilize high-fidelity prototypes to provide a realistic solution representation, allowing for valuable feedback and validation.
We also follow a three steps approach: discover, define and design.
During the first stage we are able to reveal real user pains, needs and gains and create hypotheses for the further product concepts. Define concept allows us to work on prototyping and testing in order to validate and define product scope. During the last stage, we design the defined product scope in the best possible way to make people love it from the first iteration.
Analyze your ideas and vision beforehand and get confident regarding scope, timelines, team composition, and functionality to a level enough to begin implementation.
Start seamlessly, move confidently, and optimize the implementation scope and roadmap matched to the budget.
Identify opportunities for differentiation, understand market trends, refine your product strategy, and perform end-user needs assessment.
Ensure to launch with the right technology and tools, and maximize the potential of getting off to a flying start.
Identify and assess gaps between the current state of a product or project and its target state.
It’s an upfront investment that will lead to significant savings by mitigating scope creep risks in the early stages of development.
So, the goals of the discovery phase of a project in the software development process are clear, but imagine all the skills and abilities that are required to achieve them. People dedicate significant chunks of their professional lives to mastering this process and avoiding possible pitfalls during different steps that the project discovery phase includes:
Defining the core problem or opportunity the product aims to address and clarify the objectives and goals. At this stage, you can easily focus on the goals of the product and forget about your main target customers. That’s why the next step is very important.
It’s important to orient not only on the potential end user but involve real customers in the process by conducting interviews, observations, and surveys to understand user behaviors, needs, and pain points.
Collecting and analyzing information about the project, its intended market, and its audience to identify USPs and differentiators for the product. And don’t neglect your competitor’s research. Otherwise, you may miss some interesting trends and opportunities.
Brainstorming and exploring various ideas and potential solutions to find the most efficient and cost-effective solution. The most effective way to avoid pitfalls at this stage is to stay open-minded and innovative to find your place in the market.
Evaluating the technical, financial, and operational feasibility of different concepts and narrowing the options. Here is where the importance of the right team that we outlined earlier will be especially noticeable. Proper team composition will allow you to efficiently define and outline each of the aspects.
Creating basic prototypes or mockups to visualize and test the proposed solutions with users. Here it is important not to get too attached to prototypes and stay open to the new ideas and changes that may appear during discussion or user testing.
Testing and validating the proposed concepts through user feedback and iterative refinement cycles. Though it is important to have this stage at the end of your discovery phase in the project management, it doesn’t mean that there is no need for feedback earlier in the process. It is important at each step of the way to make proper and relevant improvements.
During the project discovery stage, team composition is crucial for project success. The team collaborates closely with the Product Owner or visioner, ensuring alignment with the overall product vision and goals. A “discovery team” should consist of business analysts of the highest caliber and technological professionals/savvies. Only their coordinated teamwork can provide the best results.
Being the voice of the business, product owner emphasizes the product vision so that it is clearly understood and consistently prioritized. They explain the “why” behind each feature, take responsibility for the product backlog, and verify the commercial value at the end. Product owner is balancing scope, timing, and return on investment, to make sure needs match stakeholder expectations and fit within broader organizational objectives.
The project manager’s role lies in overseeing delivery structure and effectiveness of the overall project management discovery phase process. They are responsible for scheduling and coordinating activities, facilitating communication, and minimizing risks. To keep the team on track and moving forwards during discovery, the project manager makes sure that workshops, researches, and decision points all adhere to a tightly defined cycle.
The Business Analyst helps to translate business needs into requirements. As the product advocate, they examine workflows, conduct stakeholder interviews, and perform data analysis to uncover gaps, opportunities, and constraints for the solution. Their documentation and clarity help to bridge the distance between what a stakeholder wants and what the delivery team will build.
The UX Designer acts from the end user’s point of view. They perform user research, map user journeys, build wireframes, and test usability concepts to ensure the solution is intuitive and user-centered. During discovery, designers will test assumptions about user behavior and make sure design choices enhance the user experience and fulfill business needs.
The Solution Architect makes sure that all product decisions take technical feasibility and scalability into consideration. They review the technology choices, designs the overall system architecture, and anticipate integration issues. In discovery, the solution architect will outline risk, technical limitations, and will make sure that the proposed solution is sustainable, secure, and future-proof.
Depending on the specific requirements of the project, the discovery phase team can be extended to include additional experts such as DevOps specialists, Mobile leads, or other domain-specific professionals. During the discovery stage, the business analyst takes the lead, supported by team leads, software developers, and the tiger team, who assist with the clearly prioritized scope on the level of detailing enough to provide an estimate and implementation roadmap.
When teams fail to thoroughly analyze the competition, they lose a true sense of context in the market. Understanding what competitors are delivering – and where they are not – can help to craft a differentiated product strategy and prevents reinventing the wheel. Ignoring the competition can also help early positioning and getting ahead before competitors see and close the gap.
When teams do not pull engineers or programmers into early discussions, there can be a disconnect between product and technical decisions, leading to needless work and technical blind spots. When developers are part of the discovery process, they are able to flag potential feasibility issues, present alternative approaches, ultimately help nurture solutions that are both practical and innovative.
Viewing discovery as simply a one-time step, you are reducing your chances of success for the long haul. Product discovery must be an ongoing process in which your teams are continuously learning and integrating changing market needs, and new user feedback to maintain your product position in a shifting marketplace.
Kindgeek is a full-cycle fintech software development company that combines extensive domain knowledge with a proven track record of successfully conducting effective discovery phases. We help companies lower uncertainty, and design solutions that satisfy user requirements and business goals.
If you’re ready to turn your idea into a well-thought-out digital solution, let us start with establishing the strong foundation for technical stability, market fit, and strategic impact.
A discovery phase in software development is a great tool for ensuring that the future software product is relevant to the market, devoid of redundant functionality, and that its idea is polished. In addition, the discovery phase of a software product helps to determine the costs of the development and provides the basis upon which the rest of the software can be built.
Skipping discovery may save a few weeks at the start, but it can cost months — or even the project itself — later on. If your goal is to bring your product to the market with clarity and real purpose, make discovery non-negotiable.
Start your discovery phase today and set the foundation for a product that thrives tomorrow.
At Kindgeek, we leverage the combined power of Customer-centric design and the Lean Startup methodology throughout the product discovery phase by employing the following techniques:
At Kindgeek, we actively involve stakeholders and, if needed, end-users during this phase. We conduct workshops, interviews, and requirements elicitation sessions to gather feedback and insights. We also employ various end-user research methods to gain insights into their preferences, pain points, and behaviors.
These deliverables will vary based on the project scope and requirements but typically include the following:
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