Start here: run a Foundation Sprint to set your founding hypothesis and rank your assumptions, then use Discovery to test them.

Overview

The Discovery Phase, the first of the playbook’s three phases (Discovery, Incubation, Commercialization/Scale), is the foundational stage for identifying new opportunities and defining promising offers. Its primary objective is to understand the problem space thoroughly and define promising solutions that address genuine customer needs through deep user understanding and problem validation.

The core philosophy of this phase assumes that initial problem assumptions are often incorrect and that genuine user insights require direct engagement and observation rather than speculation or secondary research.

Methodological Approach

The Discovery phase leverages a combination of Design Thinking and Lean Startup methodologies, integrating them to systematically identify opportunities, validate customer needs, and develop initial concepts. It is deeply rooted in human-centered design (HCD), an approach that prioritizes human needs, capabilities, and behavior. This phase specifically addresses Desirability risk, focusing on whether customers actually want the product or solution.

Key Activities and Processes in the Discovery Phase

This section details the critical steps undertaken to explore problems and generate initial concepts, integrating insights from Design Sprints and broader innovation methodologies.

Problem before solution. Do not design or test solutions until the problem has evidence: direct contact with people in the segment, observed workarounds, and how often the problem happens and what it costs. Steps 1 to 3 build that evidence. Steps 4 to 6 start only when it holds. If new evidence later undercuts the problem, return to step 1; later work is kept but treated as provisional.

1. Problem Space Definition and Problem Framing

   • The process initiates with an initial problem hypothesis and assumption mapping to articulate existing beliefs about the problem, target users, and their context. These desirability assumptions are mapped early to proactively guide initial research efforts.
   • Problem Framing workshops are crucial for aligning stakeholders and crafting clear problem statements that effectively merge business needs with identified customer problems, ensuring mutual value creation. This structured pre-sprint activity streamlines subsequent Agile delivery processes by providing upfront clarity.
   • Teams develop “How Might We” (HMW) questions, which serve to reframe insight statements into actionable design opportunities without prematurely suggesting specific solutions. Design Sprint 3.0 specifically enhances HMW generation by incorporating inspiration from expert interviews, lightning talks, and mapping sessions, leading to more creative and unique solutions.
   • Lightning Talks, where team members share their diverse perspectives on the problem, can be structured into the morning discussions, especially as refined in Design Sprint 3.0.

   Problem statement development

   • Write a problem statement that joins a business need to a customer problem, names who has the problem, and names no solution.
   • Back each statement with evidence: what you saw or heard, how often the problem happens and what it costs.
   • Turn insights into How Might We questions that open options instead of prescribing an answer.
   • Use lightning talks so each team member puts their view of the problem on the table before the group converges.

2. User and Market Understanding (Ethnographic Research & Customer Discovery)

   • The objective here is to gain a deep, empathetic understanding of target users by “getting out of the building” and directly engaging with them to observe their lives, listen to their hopes, and learn about their challenges.
   • Key methods for this understanding include:
     • Expert Interviews: Gathering foundational context, historical insights, and relevant data from subject matter experts to inform initial research questions.
     • User Interviews: Engaging in conversations with potential users about their challenges, ambitions, and constraints. It’s crucial to capture exact quotes and observe body language. When testing new features for an existing product, incorporating new users can help mitigate preconceived biases.
     • Group Interviews: A useful tool for initial learning and for identifying individuals who might warrant more in-depth, individual interviews.
     • Secondary Research: Rapidly acquiring foundational knowledge about the broader context of the challenge by reviewing recent news, existing innovations, and other relevant literature.
     • Immersion: Spending dedicated time directly within the environment of the people being designed for, meticulously observing and recording concrete details and impressions.
     • Analogous Inspiration: Visiting and examining seemingly unrelated contexts (e.g., an Apple store for insights on customer experience when designing for social challenges) to gain fresh perspectives and identify transferable elements of experiences or interactions.
     • Peers Observing Peers: Empowering target users to conduct some of the research themselves and report their findings, which can yield particularly deep insights, especially on sensitive subjects.
     • Collage: A low-fidelity, hands-on technique where participants create tangible visual representations to express their thoughts and values, often surfacing unexpected themes and needs.

3. Synthesizing Learnings

   • This critical stage involves convergent thinking to make sense of the extensive qualitative data gathered. It functions as an abductive sensemaking process that organizes complexity and reveals clarity in otherwise chaotic information.
   • Teams collaboratively download their learnings, transforming individual notes, photos, and impressions into shared group knowledge using Post-it notes.
   • Core methods for synthesis include:
     • Reviewing and Translating Notes: Systematically reviewing interview notes and translating key information onto Post-it notes, categorizing them by jobs, pains, and gains for clarity.
     • Finding Themes: Clustering these Post-it notes to identify recurring patterns, commonalities, and compelling insights that emerged consistently from the research.
     • Creating Insight Statements: Rephrasing the identified themes into concise sentences that articulate a core “aha” moment or valuable learning. These statements guide subsequent design opportunities without prematurely suggesting specific solutions.
     • Creating Frameworks (Systems Mapping): Developing visual representations such as 2×2 matrices, relational maps, or journey maps to synthesize learnings, visualize patterns, and understand user perspectives within the broader system context. The “Map” exercise in Design Sprint 2.0 serves to align the team on the system they are working with, with Design Sprint 3.0 advocating for a “Map to Map” approach that integrates pre-sprint research data for a more grounded understanding.
     • Plotting HMWs along Journey Map: Organizing the generated HMW questions along a customer journey map helps to structure opportunities and themes visually, making them easier to digest and prioritize.

4. Ideation and Solution Exploration

   • This is a divergent thinking stage where teams brainstorm a wide array of potential solutions designed to meet the identified user needs.
   • The emphasis is on generating numerous ideas without immediate regard for feasibility or self-criticism. Even “crazy ideas” are encouraged, as they can often spark creative insights that might be refined later.
   • Key techniques for ideation include:
     • Brainstorming: Adhering to rules that encourage building on others’ ideas, maintaining focus, and being highly visual by putting ideas on Post-it notes and sketching.
     • Get Visual: Incorporating drawing, sculpting, and physical building throughout the process to unlock innovative solutions and help understand complex issues (e.g., visualizing crop spoilage).
     • Mash-Ups: Combining two seemingly unrelated brands or concepts to generate novel ideas for solutions (e.g., “the Harvard of agricultural extension services”).
     • Evil 8’s: A warm-up exercise from Design Sprint 3.0 that utilizes reverse thinking to stimulate bolder, more courageous ideas and alleviate performance pressure before sketching begins.
     • Lightning Demos: Showcasing inspiring solutions from other domains to spark new ideas, a core component of Design Sprint 2.0’s Day 1. Design Sprint 3.0 suggests assigning research for this activity as homework to optimize time during the sprint.
     • Solution Sketch: Individually, each team member creates a detailed sketch of their best solution idea, typically using three frames to illustrate how it functions and includes a clear title. In Design Sprint 2.0, this is a key output by the end of Monday. Design Sprint 3.0 advocates moving this activity to Tuesday morning, allowing participants to sketch with a fresh mind.
     • Idea Template: An alternative or complementary tool to the Solution Sketch, which helps organize an idea into its core value, needs, concept, and essential features.
     • Explore Your Hunch: Providing space to articulate and test intuitive ideas through quick brainstorms, rough prototypes, or expert interviews. It acknowledges that even disproven hunches offer valuable learnings.

5. Concept Refinement and Value Proposition Definition

   • This stage involves refining initial ideas into more concrete solution concepts with clearly articulated value propositions. It marks a return to convergent thinking.
   • The Value Proposition Canvas is utilized to systematically map the customer’s profile (their jobs-to-be-done, pains, and gains) with the solution’s value map (its products/services, pain relievers, and gain creators). This mapping helps to identify the fit between the proposed solution and the customer’s articulated needs.
   • The outcome of this step is a hypothetical Problem-Solution-Fit, which will later undergo rigorous validation through experimentation in the subsequent Incubation phase.
   • This canvas serves as a crucial “Innovation Interface” document, effectively describing customer problems and needs rather than just a list of features, thereby improving communication with engineering and research teams.

6. Solution Selection and Storyboarding

   • The objective here is to evaluate the various ideated solutions and converge on the most promising concepts for further detailed development and testing.
   • In Design Sprint 2.0, this crucial decision-making process typically takes place on “Choose Day” (Tuesday). Key activities include:
     • Voting: Utilizing methods such as heat map voting, straw poll voting, and a final decisive vote by the designated “decider” to select one or two concepts to move forward.
     • Solution Presentation: The moderator presents all proposed solutions to the entire team, ensuring everyone understands each concept before voting.
     • Art Museum and Speed Critique: As enhanced in Design Sprint 3.0, these activities are employed for efficiently reviewing and discussing the various solutions.
     • Storyboarding: Creating a detailed, comic book-style visual narrative of the chosen concept. This visually plots out key moments and user interactions, helping the team thoroughly think through the idea’s flow, who will use it, where, and how. In Design Sprint 2.0, this is a final activity on Tuesday, often preceded by a “user test flow”. Design Sprint 3.0 suggests a shorter, more focused time for storyboarding, arguing that time constraints can foster more concise decision-making.
   • Low-Fidelity Prototyping: While comprehensive prototyping is a later phase, scrappy, low-fidelity prototypes (e.g., wireframes, paper sketches, presentations) can be used early in Discovery. The purpose is to test critical elements of an idea and gather quick feedback, even to prove a “miserable failure” cheaply for invaluable learning. Wireframes, for instance, are useful for testing hypotheses about missing functionality or design choices without substantial investment.

Desirability Assumption Mapping

At the very start of the Discovery phase, teams inherently hold assumptions about the target customer and the problem they aim to solve. These initial assumptions are explicitly mapped to strategically guide the subsequent research efforts.

Assumption mapping is an exercise designed to articulate and document these assumptions about “what you’re trying to solve and for whom”. Within the Discovery phase, the primary focus is on Desirability assumptions, recognizing that a product’s desirability is intrinsically linked to the problem or “job-to-be-done” that a customer wishes to address.

Assumptions are then identified and rigorously prioritized, with a particular emphasis on “Leap of Faith Assumptions.” These are assumptions that are simultaneously perceived as highly important to the success of the solution and least known or most uncertain. These represent the most significant risks, as proving them false could lead to the failure of the entire product or service concept.

Crucially, these prioritized assumptions are then translated into falsifiable hypotheses. These hypotheses are rigorously testable statements, designed to yield quantifiable expected outcomes, which will be validated or refuted through structured experiments in later phases. This process ensures that early efforts are focused on de-risking the most critical uncertainties.

Expected Outputs of the Discovery Phase

By the conclusion of the Discovery phase, the team should have produced several key deliverables that establish a robust foundation for subsequent development:

• A clear Problem Space/Statement with supporting evidence and problem prioritization.
• Comprehensive Ethnographic Research and Synthesis findings, including detailed user personas (which can start as proto personas), empathy maps, and current-state customer journey maps highlighting existing experiences and pain points.
• Identified and prioritized Assumptions, presented in a comprehensive assumption map with a clear risk assessment, along with initial validation results and updated hypotheses.
• A defined Value Proposition and a completed Value Proposition Canvas, illustrating how the proposed solution aligns with and addresses specific customer needs.
• An initial Business Case or Business Model Canvas, outlining key elements such as customer segments, key partners, key resources, revenue streams, and cost structures.
• An Initial Concept or a set of potential concepts, typically represented by Solution Sketches or Idea Templates.
• A Pitch Deck or Document suitable for sharing with stakeholders to effectively communicate the concept and gain necessary buy-in.
• Hypothesis prioritization specifically for the subsequent Incubation phase, detailing the riskiest assumptions that require immediate testing.
• MVP concept recommendations with initial feature prioritization, focusing on the minimum functionality required to deliver core value for early testing.
• Defined Success Metrics for ongoing measurement of the concept’s effectiveness as it moves through further development.

Integration with Design Sprint Methodologies

Discovery borrows from two later versions of the Design Sprint.

• From Design Sprint 2.0: the decision made on day two, the map exercise that aligns the team on how the system works, and planning the user test flow before storyboarding.
• From Design Sprint 3.0: building the map from pre-sprint research, lightning-demo homework so sprint time goes further, shorter and more focused storyboarding, and the art museum with speed critique for reviewing solutions.

The Design Sprint page has the full day-by-day guide.

Success Factors

• Talk to customers directly. Secondary research supports direct contact; it doesn’t replace it.
• Name your assumptions and test them, with a pass/fail line written before each test.
• Balance divergent thinking (generating ideas) with convergent thinking (synthesis).
• Make the work visible: document and share as you go.
• Know what lets you leave Discovery: evidence that the problem is real, frequent and costly for a group you can name and reach, and that the group prefers your solution to its current workaround.