A Discovery Sprint that ends with a slide deck is theatre. Ours ends with 6 portable, client-owned artifacts.
A Discovery Sprint that ends with a slide deck is theatre. You've paid for someone's time and received a PDF you might open twice. The whole point of a structured discovery phase is to produce something that has value independent of the team that created it.
Ours ends with 6 portable, client-owned artifacts: an architecture blueprint, a data audit, a risk register, a cost model, an evaluation plan, and a build roadmap.
1. Product Requirements Document (PRD) The translation layer between business problem and technical system. What the system needs to do, for whom, in what context, and against what success criteria. Written for both business stakeholders and the engineering team that will build it.
2. Technical Blueprint The architecture specification. System topology, data flows, model selection rationale, API contracts, infrastructure requirements, and technology decisions with their reasoning. Written at the level of detail a new engineering team could implement from.
3. Data Audit An honest assessment of the data landscape. What exists, what's usable, what's missing, what needs to be collected. Identity and quality issues documented with their impact on feasibility. This is often the most valuable artifact, it tells you what the project actually is, as opposed to what you hoped it would be.
4. Risk Register Technical, data, operational, and integration risks, each with a severity rating, likelihood, and mitigation path. Not a list of things that might go wrong written to cover our backs. A structured document you can review in a project retrospective.
5. Cost Model A range-based estimate for each phase: development, infrastructure, ongoing operation, and retraining. Broken down by work type so you can stress-test the assumptions. Not a single number, a model you can run scenarios through.
6. Build Roadmap (WBS) A work breakdown structure for the full build, from current state to production handoff. Phase structure, task decomposition, dependencies, and owner assignments. The document your engineering team uses to estimate and plan.
The artifacts are portable because they're designed to be used without us. The architecture blueprint should be implementable by a different vendor. The roadmap should be usable by an in-house team. The whole point is that you own what we produce, not just our good intentions.
We run 2-hour feasibility calls at no cost. We'll tell you what applies to your project.