Wrapping up
Sharing what you learn
Unless confidentiality issues mean you cannot, you should talk publicly about what you're learning. You could do this by publishing blog posts or running open show and tells.
This helps people across and outside your organisation know what you're doing and makes it easier to collaborate with the other organisations working in your problem space.
How you know discovery is finished
Your discovery is finished when you've decided whether you want to move on to alpha. There a couple of factors that play into this decision, including whether:
- there's a viable service you could build that would make it easier for users to do the thing they need to do
- it's cost-effective to pursue the problem - this means weighing up how much it'd cost against how much of an improvement you think you could make
It's not a failure to stop at the end of the discovery phase if your research shows that's the best thing to do. In fact, you'll be saving time and money that could be better spent elsewhere.
If you do decide to move on to alpha, you'll need to make sure you:
- understand the wider context and the other services, teams and organisations working on similar problems to you
- are clear on how what you're working on fits into that wider problem space
- have a list of ideas you'd like to test at alpha and an idea of which one you'd like to test first
- know roughly who you need in your team for alpha
- know how you'll measure whether you've been successful
Work in Progress!
This site is a work in progress and any opinions contained here are intended to spark discussion within each discipline's community of practice.
Created: 2023-06-26