What we do in week one
A day-by-day account of a Nordwell discovery week, including the parts that are uncomfortable.
Discovery has a reputation as the phase where consultants read your documents and hand back a deck. Ours is five days, mostly conversations, and it ends with a written statement of the problem that everyone in the room has agreed to.
Monday: the disagreement inventory
We interview stakeholders separately and ask each the same question: what is this project for? The answers rarely match. Collecting the mismatch on day one, before anyone has invested in a direction, is the single highest-value thing we do all week.
Tuesday and Wednesday: users and evidence
Six to ten user conversations, plus whatever the analytics already know. We look for the gap between what the product measures and what people describe. That gap is usually where the actual opportunity is hiding.
Thursday: constraints
A session with engineering about what is genuinely hard, what is merely annoying, and what everyone assumes is impossible but is not. This is where roadmaps get realistic.
Friday: the uncomfortable readout
We present one problem statement, the evidence behind it, and an explicit list of what we recommend not doing. The not-doing list is the part that earns its keep — and the part that occasionally makes Friday afternoon tense.
By the following Monday there is a shared, written understanding of the problem. Everything after that is comparatively easy.