Nobody wants to be the person who slows down a project. When there’s a deadline, starting to build feels like progress, and a few more weeks of planning can feel like stalling.

But the decisions a project depends on get made either way. If the work before the build gets skipped, teams make those decisions faster and with less information.

Why Projects Miss Their Targets

Gartner’s 2024 survey of more than 3,100 CIOs and technology executives found that, on average, only 48% of digital initiatives meet or exceed their business outcome targets.

PMI’s research on project success, based on nearly 10,000 survey responses, found that projects do better when success is defined early. Projects that set success criteria up front, put a measurement system in place, and tracked performance along the way had success rates nearly two times higher than projects missing any of those three.

Success criteria answer a simple question: what does this project have to achieve, and how will anyone know it did? Discovery is the phase where that gets settled.

What Is Discovery in a Digital Project?

Discovery is the work that happens before design and development begin. It settles the questions a project depends on: who it’s for, what they need, what the business needs from it, and what the build has to support. It covers three areas.

Research. Stakeholder interviews, competitor analysis, and a review of existing content and performance data. This is where we test assumptions against evidence.

Architecture. How content, features, and systems fit together, planned before design starts. Changing a plan costs far less than changing a finished build.

Behavioral mapping. How people move through a decision and where they stall. We analyze user journeys using the Fogg Behavior Model, which looks at three elements that shape whether someone acts: ability, motivation, and prompts. It’s part of our behavioral design work.

Discovery in Practice

Alloy Digital’s 20-year partnership with Southeast Toyota Distributors includes a digital transformation of their enterprise website. That work began with discovery: an envisioning and planning phase that produced a strategic roadmap and a clear implementation strategy for the build. The project also included data architecture work that turned complex backend systems into a structure consumers could navigate, and a UX strategy that set focus areas, guiding principles, and measurable objectives. The platform now serves over 800,000 monthly visitors.

What Discovery Should Deliver

A useful discovery phase leaves you with something you can act on, such as:

• Documented goals and how success will be measured
• Findings from stakeholders, users, and competitors
• A plan for how content and features will be structured
• Priorities that show what comes first and what can wait

If discovery ends with a report nobody acts on, it hasn’t done its job.

Discovery adds time at the start, and it does the most good before the scope is locked. We explore that timing in Why the Best Digital Partnerships Start Before the Scope of Work.

Planning a project and not sure what to settle before it starts? Talk to our team.