With over 5 million small and medium sized businesses in the UK and around 500,000 new businesses starting every year, it is clear a vibrant SME sector is critical to the long term economic growth and prosperity in the UK. It is widely reported that SMEs grow two to three times faster if they embrace the digital economy and utilise the digital tools widely available. However 1.2m SMEs in the UK do not yet see the benefit of adopting digital.

ABOUT THIS TALK

Running a discovery phase is a vital step in building a good service in the Public sector. It helps ensure the team understand the problem space, know who the users are and understand their context. This in turn helps make sure we’re coming up with hypotheses and ideas to take into an Alpha that are solving the right problems.

However, despite the importance of a ‘good’ discovery to reduce the risk of investing time and money into the wrong thing, lots of teams struggle with knowing what good looks like. Without a defined backlog and list of user stories, Delivery and Product Managers often struggle to know whether a Discovery is on track to deliver the right answers at the right time.

Will Myddelton, ex-GDS Product Person, wrote a brilliant article on setting up a discovery for success. Experimenting and iterating on this, Laura and the Made Tech team came up with an approach to help teams assess their progress collaboratively, and continuously course correct, to ensure they deliver the intended answers at the end of the discovery.

Laura will talk through this process and share some of the templates Made Tech have now adopted, and demonstrate the impact this has had one some recent discoveries.