What's inside​

Discovery Workshops
at a glance

The Discovery Workshops are face-to-face or remote meetings  dedicated
to unraveling and validating your business ideas in an efficient way.

They usually take 2 business days, but we tailor both their agenda and duration to your needs.

Understand business goals, user needs,
and technical feasibility.

Translate business requirements into actionable steps.

Discovery workshops help us:

What you get from the workshops

An understanding
between us

Saving time and money

Business takeways

We know what needs to be built, when, and what costs will follow. We are aware of all the problems we aim to solve and have a solid plan for how to do it.

Visualization techniques help us identify edge cases, troublesome areas, and costly issues. What we achieve during these workshops would take weeks to discover without them.

You get concrete process guidelines for the development of your project based on our expertise and the experience we accrued working on over 390+ projects.

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Discovering
the undiscovered

We help you to figure out the unclear aspects. This guarantee that the vision you have in mind will become reality and your product will be placed in the right context.

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The process

Pre workshop analysis

We analyze what we discovered about the project up to this point. Then, we prepare the workshop’s agenda and necessary materials that will help us dig deeper into the details. In the meantime, we create a team dedicated to your project.

Workshop

We discuss your business and technical needs by visualising the whole system to present the entire user journey and accompanying system actions. This makes it easier to notice problematic areas and find connections and dependencies within the app.

Solutioning

Gathering all the arrangements from the workshops and translating them into an actionable project plan, including sitemaps, user stories, detailed estimates, a roadmap, and drafting team proposal.

Development

Armed with the initial sitemaps and product decisions, we can start the iterative process of creating the product with you. You will receive prototypes and an actionable documentation.

Workshops’ attendees

Business analyst

Digs deeper into the project scope by asking thorough questions to make sure the project realizes your business goals

Product designer

Makes sure the product develops in the right direction and is aligned with the workshop outcome.

Tech lead

Provides technical expertise, insights, and advice on tasks realization.

Project manager

Serves as a link between you and the rest of the team, ensuring the work is progressing within time and budget.

2-3 representatives with a domain knowledge and good understanding of product vision, business processes as well as target user group's expectations and behaviors.

Exemplary agenda

Each workshop is different, and its exact format and used techniques vary depending on the project’s specifics and complexity. Usually, we divide workshops into two 1-day sessions during which we discuss key areas of the project, like here:

• Introduction, getting to know each other, rules

• Product vision: ‘Hot Air Balloon’

• Branding (if requested)

• Lunch break

• Defining user personas

• User journey mapping

• Architecture, structure, and configuration

• Tech stack and approaches

• Documenting

• Communication and reporting flow along with roles and responsibilities split

• Lunch break

• In-depth analysis of planned features

• ‘How might we’ session: edge case analysis

• Additional features planning

Tools we use during
workshops

We tailor the techniques used during the workshops depending on what insights we still need to discover. These are the most commonly used tools during the discovery workshops.

Hot air balloon

A product vision technique used to capture product goal and vision (Paradise Island) while bringing into light internal and external factors (wind, sandbags) that might help or bring some impediments on the way. The exercise is concluded with a list of steps that need to be taken in order to achieve the goal and arrive at the dream destination.

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User personas

Fictional characters created based on the market or customer research in order to represent different user types who might use your service, product, website or brand as a whole. Creating personas helps to step out of your shoes and understand users’ needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals.

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How might we

A design-thinking tool that uses brainstorming to facilitate ideas. In a workshop context it can be used as a problem-solving technique bringing focus to a given persona’s problem/goal and facilitating ideas of how we might resolve this problem and help the persona to achieve a given goal.

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User journey mapping

A customer journey map is a visual representationvof your customer’s experience. It allows youvto capture the path that customers follow whenvthey buy a product, sign up for a service, or otherwise interact with your site.

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User flow diagram

User Flow Diagrams represent a given path taken by the user on a website or app to complete a task. The user flow takes them from their entry point through a set of steps towards a successful outcome and final action, such as purchasing a product.

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Deliverables

Workshop deliverables would vary and depend on the topics discussed during the discovery workshop. However, typically the outcomes of the workshop tend to be similar.

• User personas

• User flows

• User stories (for selected topics)
  A brief, plain-language explanation of a feature or functionality written from a user’s point of view.

• Defined priorities

• Product roadmap
  A high-level summary that maps out the project scope and timeline while visualis in project milestones. It can be done as a diagram or with the help of Jira.

• Project detailed estimates

• Wireframes for selected screen/user story
  Exemplary wireframes represent selected screens or user activities with mocked up web or mobile low-fidelity design

How to prepare
for the Discovery
Workshop?

Sometimes, the workshop is just a compilation of necessary questions asked at particular moments in a particular order.
Answering these questions ahead of the workshop will help us proceed with the discussion smoothly.

• What are the goals of your business?

• What are the goals of this product?

• Do the business goals support user goals?

• Why should people use your app instead of the competitor’s?

• What’s your monetization plan and how will it affect the user experience?

• Who are the users and what is their problem?

• Will the product solve that problem?

• Is it the right problem to solve?

Expertise and insight

I really appreciate how Monterail is able to dig into a project from the business angle. Starting with the very first conversations, we found in Monterail a partner we could discuss our product goals with and bounce off ideas for our first MVP. Currently, I’m very happy how everyone on the team, from the project manager to the backend developer, actively has our user in mind while building our application.

Solid relationship for the future

During the discovery workshop, we managed to establish a common ground with the development team. We built a solid relationship for the future. Plenty of visual practices allowed us to see the transformation between the idea and its realization. It was the biggest highlight of this time.