Overcome dead-end initiatives with a product discovery journey

Dead-end projects are frustrating, as well as actively harmful — they drain your company's resources, taking time, budget and effort while not accomplishing anything. These initiatives also cast a shadow over the rest of your efforts, harming morale, fueling risk-aversion and taking attention away from more useful undertakings.

However, there is a way to overcome these projects. Product discovery is a powerful tool that helps you reclaim wasted resources and focus on initiatives that really matter.

Breaking the cycle and getting stalled initiatives moving again demands a proactive approach. When you realize one of your organization's design projects has hit a dead end, you can start a product discovery cycle to get it back on track.

How do product initiatives become stalled?

When design efforts stop leading toward useful outcomes or designers feel they're going in circles, a product design process has reached a dead end. These effects can sometimes be hard to see from within the design team itself but may be clear to project leaders.

If you find your frustration growing with a project and notice that the timeline is ballooning, those are both good signs that the initiative is dead-ended. While resources still go into stalled projects, little value emerges.

Product development can start slowing down in subtle ways, caused by a variety of root causes. Some of the most common issues include:

• Lack of communication: Design teams within organizations may end up in silos, not communicating with one another before starting new design or development efforts. This lack of internal visibility may lead to projects that are redundant or even competing, meaning most of the effort being expended is wasted.
• Internal politics: In some cases, projects' directions are dictated by mandates from upper management, rather than the designers' instincts — or the real needs of the users. When projects reach a dead end due to this type of thinking, it's hard to get them unstuck unless leaders realize that their planned course of action isn't working out.
• Misalignment with user needs: There's more than one way for a project to become misaligned with the reality of users' requirements. In some cases, designers working in isolation can create a technically sound framework based on an outdated sense of the market, never realizing that it no longer has a strong use case.

Whatever the cause of a stalled project may be, launching a new discovery phase can be a viable solution. This is a way to reconnect the work with real user needs and business objectives.

What goes into the product discovery journey for a dead-end project?

In some special cases, a product discovery process may only take a few weeks, with a rapid process that sacrifices depth allowing companies to hit strict deadlines. With that said, it's usually wise to follow a full schedule, which means four or more weeks. Taking this extra time allows consultants to engage in a full, structured examination of the project.

The steps of a full product discovery journey include:

• Clarifying the brief: The team responsible for discovery needs to understand what the company does, both in general and in this particular project. What is the business objective for the project, and what user pain point is it setting out to solve? This information will become the foundation for further study to come.
• Researching and listing concerns: With the brief clarified, it's time to determine where the design project is failing to align with objectives. Third-party observers take this opportunity to audit the existing work and determine what decisions have been made so far. This will result in a list of concerns to address and suggestions to help the project pivot back to its goal.
• Designing and iterating: As with design on a net-new project, design to unstick a project involves creating new iterations and performing user testing. Each round of testing acts as a milestone, with a new wave of data coming in to help guide the project. Setting aside enough time for product discovery will ideally allow the experts to perform several iterations.
• Handing off to developers: The objective of the design journey is to settle on a design that suits users' needs and points the project toward delivering tangible ROI. If the process succeeds, the next step is to hand the revised design over to the development team to turn it into a real, functional piece of software.

The longer your organization is willing to spend on this process of product discovery, the better. It's ideal for the effort to reach its natural conclusion. Just as with the discovery phase of a freshly launched product, the end result should be a plan for a product that targets a specific issue and a real user base, and that will effectively resolve that issue.

What actions result from a product discovery journey?

The details of a product may change drastically as a result of a discovery phase. Rather than something to worry about or avoid, this high level of influence is a net positive. If your organization is willing to pivot significantly, it can unlock value from a project that had previously stalled out.

Freedom to change direction will vary depending on a company's specific identity. The scale of the business is often the determining factor in whether discovery can lead to a major pivot:

• Startups and SMEs are typically more willing to change projects from their initial specifications, largely because pivoting to pursue promising ideas is a foundational part of the startup model.
• Corporations may be slower or less open to shifting their priorities. There are more levels of bureaucracy at these companies, as well as formalized processes around starting new projects.

Despite that intrinsic split, businesses of all kinds should be willing to accept the advice of third-party experts at the end of a product discovery journey. Making changes in response to the process's findings is the primary way to unblock a stuck project and get back to providing positive net value.

How can you get started with product discovery?

When you detect that a design project is not delivering results, but still believe that there's a viable use case for the effort, you have to realign your internal teams and then, if things haven't moved, it's time to contact third-party experts. Consultants can perform discovery from an outsider's perspective, removed from the biases or assumptions that come from being too close to the design efforts thus far.

Engaging with these experts can resolve a variety of internal issues that lead to projects becoming stuck in the first place. Specific value-adds of a third-party discovery effort include:

• Cutting through internal politics: It can be difficult to sway a leader from their initial vision for a project if the only people paying attention to the effort are internal team members. The opinions of outside consultants, on the other hand, can break through assumptions and help higher-ups see the need to pivot after they've proven that a product is indeed stalled.
• Pointing out blind spots or overlooked details: In addition to presenting findings to management, consultants can work closely with the designers who are in charge of a given project. Blind spots can emerge among team members, making an unbiased perspective valuable in rediscovering the purpose of a product.
• Refreshing projects with new philosophies: The most skilled experts bring helpful knowledge and insights to the table when they engage with a project. This may mean introducing concepts such as design systems. With this infusion of best practices, it's simpler to get projects back on track to provide a positive return on investment.

The addition of these third-party experts is a new factor in a stalled project, and this change in composition can be critical in getting the design process moving again. New eyes, new opinions and an authority that comes from outside of the standard chain of command could be just what designers need.

Ready to revive your stalled initiatives?

When your company is dealing with a dead-end project, you can turn to Transcenda's team of experts to perform the necessary research and find the way forward. We have worked with companies of all sizes and industries on unsticking and rescoping design projects.

To determine whether you need intervention from product design specialists, you can ask yourself whether any of your current projects are resulting in frustration rather than results. If you're pouring time, energy and resources into a design step but don't seem close to ROI, it could be time to put fresh eyes on the problem.

The value of working with a team of knowledgeable professionals doesn't just come from the end results, either. When your internal employees work side-by-side with Transcenda's design specialists, your personnel can pick up best practices and upskill themselves, absorbing advanced skills in methodologies.

Stuck initiatives don't have to become a drain on your resources — you can set them back on track with a formalized product discovery journey. Contact Transcenda's experts to learn how this process can apply to your company.