Software development consulting that starts with a free discovery workshop

The goal is clear and the feature list is not. Discovery turns the goal into a scope with priorities before work on the build begins.

You are weighing changes to a system that is in use. A technical audit gives the facts about the system, and the next step follows from what it shows.

The product has to connect to other systems. Integration and technical questions belong on the agenda of the first workshop, before the schedule is running.

Discovery for AI ideas uses our own AI toolkit. Sprints that test a proof of concept check the idea before the next stages, as they did for PSONI. For a product with AI at its centre, AI MVP development follows.

A Project Tech Leader owns the technical side of the project, architecture and technical solutions included. A Project Manager or Scrum Master keeps the schedule and the process, and a Business Owner takes part in the workshop.

A Product Owner or a decision maker confirms the scope, and you can take the Product Owner role yourself. The decision maker is in the room, so the scope and the order of the modules are confirmed there, and the schedule of the next steps is agreed at the same table.

A Product Designer takes part in discovery as well. With your Product Owner, the designer shapes the product vision and writes the hypotheses to validate, and they become a roadmap and plans for product workshops. The designer also defines personas and maps user journeys, and the work happens in Miro, FigJam and Figma.

A written summary of the workshop records what was agreed and what happens next. It comes with the confirmed scope and a schedule of next steps.

The free basic discovery ends with a confirmed scope, an estimate and a basic mockup or proof of concept. The wider set of documents in the table below belongs to extended discovery.

When the project calls for it, discovery continues in writing, with a requirements specification and user stories for the first phase of the build.

The Project Manager is usually the Product Owner or the Scrum Master of the project, never both. The Project Manager organises regular project retrospectives, in addition to the Scrum events.

The Project Manager is responsible for the schedule, the priorities of tasks and the deadlines, and watches progress with corrective actions when needed. A change outside the agreed scope is blocked until the client accepts it. Risks are identified and escalated to the Business Owner or the Head of Delivery.

Each project has its own Slack channel, clear rules for communication with the client, and meetings with an agenda and a kept timebox.

When the client prefers it, we work in the client's tools. At Skyfri that meant MS Teams, Outlook with accounts in the client's domain, Slack and the client's Jira, and at KYOTO Slack and the client's Jira.

The engineers who run the workshop go on to build the product, so you explain your business once and the people who heard it write the code. We sign an NDA before the workshop, and we describe some clients by their industry only. Copyright in the code transfers to you with each payment, for the uses listed in the contract.

We are the data processor and you are the controller, with a separate data processing agreement for each project under Article 28(3) of the GDPR. Accounts are named, access runs through AWS IAM Identity Center on the principle of least privilege, and procedures are reviewed every 12 months. We report an incident within 24 hours at the latest. After the contract ends we delete or return your data within 10 working days and confirm it in writing within 7 days. The Security and GDPR page has the details.