What is the Discovery & Framing in Agile Product Management

Discovery and Framing is a critical phase to define what is the MVP to build, and why. Many companies have a product idea in mind, and they normally jump right into defining the product requirements before having validated that it is indeed a great idea that people need.

We also call Discovery and Framing D&F. The goals of the D&F are:

• Validate the assumptions that you made about the product
• Have validated user stories before spending time and effort to build it.
• Build an MVP which is small enough just to validate your product value proposition.

Namely, the whole D&F exercise is to ensure that you are building the RIGHT product before wasting time building it. It is part of the Lean Startup practice which encourages iterative “ Build, Validate, Learn” cycles.

A Discovery phase usually includes the following activities/workshops:

• Assumptions Workshop
• Prepare User Interview Questions
• Synthesis user interview results

The Discovery part is to go broad for exploratory research.

A Framing phase usually includes the following activities/workshops:

• Persona Analysis to find users’ Goals and Needs
• How Might We Statement to help brain storm solutions
• Idea generation and 2x2 feature prioritization
• Define MVP
• Scenario run though
• Sketch to build low fidelity wire frames.
• Validate the wire frames with real users.
• Write user stories (up to this point, the user stories are validate)

The Framing part is to narrow down based on all findings to find a solution and the road map.