Understand

First, we strive to understand your context:

• Who are your customers? What are their needs, their frustrations, their ideal worlds... ?
• What is your business like? What kind of market do you operate in? What is the revenue model? How can you differentiate?
• What is your organisation like? Who are the stakeholders? How does value flow through the organisation? How does this map on your architecture and systems?

Define

Next, we get everybody on board with what we are trying to solve. We'll end up with things like:

• A north star: a tangible, long-term vision on how to create customer value
• Objectives: priorities and milestones on our way
to the star(s)
• Guiding principles: a framework to help us 
make tough decisions along the way

Shape

After we understand what we are trying to solve, we need to explore the how:

• What UX would make end-users more successful?
• What's the business model or pricing strategy?
• What technology or architecture would enable all this?

Validate

Every idea is an assumption until we prove otherwise. We validate to mitigate the risk that is inherent in product development. In validating, we cover different bases:

• Desirable - do customers want this?
• Feasible - can we reasonably build it?
• Viable - can it generate the intended business value?
• Usable - is the execution done right?

Plan

At this point, we're confident that we know what needs to be built. But we still need to build it before we see any return on our work. In this phase, the team translates the idea into a tangible plan. They'll map the work ahead on all relevant dimensions: scope, time, budget, architecture, ...

This is where discovery meets delivery. Which prepares us for the next step: deploy or die.

Bigger picture

The goal of discovery is to filter out bad ideas and retain the most promising ones. To make this happen, we validate our ideas or assumptions before going all-in.

As soon as we are confident about an idea, we need to get it into the hands of the user as soon as possible. Only then can we evaluate how the market and the user react and whether it brings us closer to our north star.