The hidden cost of discovery theatre
Workshops, miro boards, persona spreads, "north star" diagrams. A lot of agency discovery is performance. We charge for actual discovery instead — and our clients can tell the difference.
A discovery phase that produces beautiful artefacts but no decisions has not actually discovered anything. It has performed discovery. The artefacts are evidence of work, not evidence of thought. Most of the time the client knows this and goes along with it because the artefacts are the proof they can show their boss.
We have stopped doing this. Our discovery output is a written brief. It is short. It says what the work is, who it is for, what it is meant to do, and what we will not do. It is signed by us and by the client. Anything that does not contribute to writing that document is removed.
This is not a minimalism flex. It is an honesty flex. If we cannot write a useful brief in two weeks of conversation, we do not have a project yet. If we can, we should not pretend it took longer.
The version of this we used to run had four workshops, a research synthesis deck, a customer journey map, and an opportunity matrix. The version we run now has stakeholder interviews, a written audit, and a brief. The work that comes out the other side is better, partly because the team was thinking instead of performing, and partly because the client now has a document they can hold us to.