Unpacking the Discovery Workshop — where app magic begins

[Editor's note: This is the second post in our "Demystifying Discovery" series. In the first post, we discussed why a strategic Discovery Process is essential to building lovable apps and digital products. Here, we go behind the scenes of our Discovery Workshop.]

While the complete ArcTouch Discovery Process consists of several steps, at its heart lies the Discovery Workshop. This is where the real magic begins: a dynamic, in-person collaborative event to lay the strategic foundation for your project. 

We bring all key stakeholders together to align on the true business opportunity and user needs, ensuring a successful path forward. Whether you're a nimble startup or an established Fortune 500 enterprise, our tailored workshops consistently kick off projects with purpose and focus.

Setting the stage: The path to the Discovery Workshop

To ensure our discussions are truly informed, we take a few important steps.

We begin with a mutual non-disclosure agreement (NDA). This simple but crucial step allows our team and yours to freely share any relevant information – whether it's confidential reports, sketches, presentations, or even just early ideas – without hesitation.

Next, our pre-workshop research begins.

Your ArcTouch client manager and our leadership team will speak with you to gain a preliminary understanding of your product vision and any work that’s been done to date. We then bring in specialists relevant to your project – for example, designers and developers with expertise in cross-platform development, connected products, or digital accessibility. These experts help identify key areas to explore during the Discovery Workshop.

Your Pre-Discovery Workshop homework

Once the Discovery Workshop proposal is agreed upon, our research and preparation accelerate. We typically ask clients to gather some materials – using a customized version of this “Discovery Workshop Preparation Checklist.” This covers the fundamentals we’ll dive deeply into during the workshop, including:  

• Overarching business goals and strategies.

• Requirements for core features and functionality.

• Summaries of relevant industry and customer research.

• Existing brand guidelines, design elements, and visual references. 

• Current technical environment, including data sources, APIs, and third-party services.

• Operational or regulatory constraints unique to the business or product. 

It's perfectly fine if there are unknowns or gaps at this stage. This is expected and typical with many of the clients we work with. The beauty of the Discovery Workshop is that it's precisely where we'll address these questions, explore solutions, and align on the path forward. The information you provide in advance allows our team to conduct even deeper research and preparation – a process accelerated by AI tools – ensuring we arrive in the room fully equipped to guide the discussion and make the most of our time together.

Determining who should attend

For the workshop to be most effective, assembling the right team is crucial – both from ArcTouch and your organization.

From ArcTouch, you can expect a dedicated team, typically including your Client Manager and key representatives from our product, engineering, and design teams.

On your side, we recommend involving stakeholders who can represent the full spectrum of your business. Ideally, this group would include at least one expert in each of these areas:

• Business leadership (e.g., product owners, strategists)

• Marketing and User Experience (e.g., brand managers, UX researchers)

• Technology (e.g., IT leads, architects)

• Design (e.g., creative directors, visual designers)

• Customer Success (e.g., customer support, field support)

The goal is to bring together diverse perspectives that encompass all angles of your business opportunity and user needs. The more comprehensive the representation, the richer the insights, and the more robust the solutions we can collectively develop.

It’s very important that there are people who can represent the app’s intended target users (your customers) and “speak” on their behalf. Some of the best roles within an organization to help with that during a workshop are customer support. We may also recommend scheduling preliminary in-person interviews with some target users. Gathering direct insights from them can provide invaluable context and further enrich the workshop discussions.

The Discovery Workshop: Forging a product’s path forward

During the workshop itself, we guide participants through a structured yet flexible process, exploring the fundamental “why” behind your product, charting the strategic “how” it will achieve its goals, and defining the granular “what” needs to be built. These interconnected dimensions ensure a holistic understanding of the product as we move from broad strategic alignment to detailed feature definition. To capture and organize the rich insights generated during these sessions, we leverage specialized tools, including these ArcTouch Discovery Workshop FigJam Templates. These digital frameworks are instrumental in turning the results from the exercises we conduct into actionable tasks.

Exploring the 'why': Establishing shared purpose

We begin by ensuring everyone understands the core business goals, challenges, industry trends, user needs, and the overarching vision for the product. This foundational step establishes a shared understanding of your current position and where you aim to go. We might kick off with collaborative brainstorming sessions, mapping out the current landscape and future aspirations, ensuring we're solving the right problems. Simply put, the goal is to confirm the fundamental "why" behind building this digital product.

Example exercises include:

• Pretend press release: A powerful exercise to start with the desired outcome. Teams break into small groups to draft a fictional "press release" outlining the product's title, introduction, the problem it solves, its solution, quotes, how it works, and how to get started.

• Is/is not/could be: We gather input about what the app should be, what it definitely isn't, and how it might evolve in the near future.

• Success metrics: We align on key performance indicators (KPIs) for the main project team, for end customers, and for other stakeholders within the company.

• Live user interviews: We conduct moderated interviews where the interviewee and interviewer are together in a room. The rest of the team listens and collects notes on user pain points, delights, observations, and ideas.

During early phases of the Discovery Workshop, we define key metrics for the digital product we want to build — part of the “why” we explore.

As we touched on in our introductory post, Demystifying App Discovery, during our Discovery Workshop with Common Sense Media we quickly identified that while an app would benefit from a subscription model, the underlying business logic for that model wasn't yet in place. Instead of prematurely creating an app, our strategic recommendation was to first build and test the subscription business logic on their website. This crucial "why" alignment saved them significant time and resources. They returned months later, ready for us to build an app that ultimately converted free members to paid subscribers at rates far exceeding their initial forecasts.

Exploring the 'how': Charting the strategic path

While we're aligning on the "why," we also investigate "how" we're going to satisfy the project's business goals. We explore specific constraints and technical challenges. We get to the “how” with interactive exercises such as competitive analysis reviews and initial user journey mapping, where we start to visualize the path forward, ensuring technical feasibility and strategic alignment.

Example exercises include

• How might we: An exercise to capture opportunities for interventions or improvements. While different team members present, listeners gather "how might we" statements. At the end, the team groups these and votes on areas that are the highest priority for the first iteration.

• Competitor landscape: We come prepared with visual examples from competitors' digital products and vote on things we like or don’t like — and discuss why.

• Design vibes: We arrive with a pre-populated diagram of visual inspiration, typically plotted along two axes, to understand and align on the desired visual direction for the app.

In a Design vibes exercise, we use a tool similar to a mood board to capture feedback on the visual direction of an app.

Exploring the 'what': Granular feature planning

Next, we get into the specifics of a product we’ll build for your customers. This involves examining the customer journey, user story mapping (a topic we'll explore in detail later in this series), and brainstorming features for your minimum lovable product (MLP). We’ll create our "wall of stickies" – a tangible representation of the collective insights and strategic path forward, ready to be translated into a concrete development plan. This is “what” we’ll ultimately build. 

Example exercises include

• Brainstorm science fair:  We brainstorm hypotheses or solutions to test for a specific, prioritized problem. Each person in the room nominates three, and the team votes on the top solution to expand upon in the mapping exercise afterward.

• User journey mapping: Mapping a full journey for the user to accomplish specific goals alongside the pain points, feelings, and opportunities for innovation.

• User story mapping: Mapping specific user steps and actions to help prioritize features for version 1 of your product, and the future releases. 

• Service blueprint mapping: Similar to user story mapping, but moves beyond the app itself to include things like employee touchpoints, operational systems, and support systems to support a larger journey.

• Rapid sketching: Participants sketch their favorite ideas or features from the workshop, for design ideation afterward.

In a user journey exercise, we map key actions a user may take to accomplish a goal, along with possible friction, feelings, and opportunities.

From vision to reality: What happens after the Workshop?

What happens with all those "aha!" moments we had when everyone leaves the room after the Discovery Workshop? They're the fuel for everything that comes next. Our team takes those brilliant insights and turns them into a clear, achievable path forward for your product.

Here’s how we keep that momentum going and bring your vision to life:

• Your Workshop story, wrapped up nicely: We pull together all the insights we uncovered in the Discovery Workshop. We create an easy-to-digest summary that captures all the big ideas and key decisions. It's a go-to guide, perfect for sharing with anyone who needs to be in the loop.

• Designing the experience: With our shared vision in hand, our design team gets to work sketching out the structure of your product. Even before the Discovery Process is officially over, we start to map precisely how users will move through the app to make sure it feels intuitive and delightful. We review these iterations before we begin the build phase to ensure the alignment we established during the workshop remains in place. 

• The roadmap to lovability: We take all prioritized features and ideas from the Discovery Workshop and begin building your initial product roadmap. This becomes our navigational aid for development, showing the most impactful steps to get your MLP into users' hands.

• Making sure it all works (under the hood): While the designers and the product managers are planning the journey, our engineers are busy mapping out the technical architecture. They're confirming everything is solid, scalable, and ready to bring those brilliant ideas to life.

When all these pieces come together it's not just a document; it's our shared blueprint for what's next – the exciting journey of detailed design and development. Importantly, this also includes a detailed cost to build your product — something we’ll cover in detail in an upcoming post. 

Meanwhile, that collaborative spirit from the ArcTouch Discovery Workshop carries right through, ensuring we're all perfectly aligned for a smooth project. And ultimately, we’ve completed the important strategic work needed to fulfill our promise and deliver a truly lovable app.

Ready to experience the magic of a Discovery Workshop?

Interested in learning more about how our Discovery Workshop can help your company turn an app idea into a lovable product? Let's start a conversation and we can share more.