The art of discovery: why we’re nearly always the most expensive

You’re a Head of eCommerce and you’ve made the decision to move to Shopify. You’ve gathered your requirements, narrowed down potential agency partners, and you’re at the point of reviewing proposals.

While the Shopify platform means there’s a level of standardisation to the proposals, there’s still a noticeable difference between the approaches suggested.

Choosing the right partner is critical for a Shopify migration project, and you’re weighing up questions such as:

• Which partner do I have the most confidence in to meet our requirements?
• Which partner has shown the greatest understanding of our business, challenges, and the potential risks of the project?
• Which partner do I think can meet our timelines?
• Which partner is most likely to deliver the project to budget?

The truth is that website projects are complex. There’ll often be integrations from back-end systems to Shopify, data migrations or transformations, multiple stakeholders with their own needs, and unknowns that rear their head over time.

At proposal stage, every agency is using their experience, expertise, and new business processes to give a best estimate of timelines, budget, and complexity.

But that hard work typically starts post agency selection…

Discovery done properly

9 times out of 10, we’re told during an RFP process that our discovery phase of the project is ‘more expensive’ or ‘completed over a longer period of time’ than others. And that’s fine. We’re comfortable with that. In fact, it’s purposeful.

We complete discovery in the level of detail that we do to ensure that those questions eCommerce businesses have - who is the right partner, who do they have the most confidence in to deliver against their requirements - are answered as transparently as possible.

Our aim is to leave discovery with a project plan in which we have significant confidence. We know your business, we know your requirements, and we know exactly what we need to deliver.

As I’ve said, it’s almost impossible to be 100% confident during an RFP process - so we want to make sure that we give complete confidence as soon as possible afterwards.

Throughout the rest of this blog post, I’m going to talk through our discovery process – which should make it crystal clear that the investment put into discovery will define the success of your migration to Shopify.

The devil is in the detail

The success of any Shopify migration is often defined by how successful discovery is. As a client, the last thing you want is to get into the project build and uncover a requirement that can’t be delivered against due to a lack of due diligence. You’d also prefer not to go back to the business and communicate a significant delay, or the need for an increased budget when the build is in full flow.

Our discovery process has been refined over time to mitigate these situations occurring. In a nutshell, our discovery looks as follows:

Comprehensive onboarding – post the RFP process, you’ll be supplied with a variety of onboarding questionnaires, which will be used to bring our project team up to speed on your business and your requirements.

Stakeholder interviews – something we’ve learnt over a decade of delivering Shopify migrations is that getting to know key stakeholders from across the business is invaluable.

Other departments often have requirements that may not be covered in the brief. Or, they may have knowledge of a piece of technology and how it needs to interact with Shopify, that we can benefit from understanding. We sit down with stakeholders in an informal environment, with the aim of gathering all requirements from across the business.

In-person discovery – by completing onboarding and stakeholder interviews, we’ll have a much better understanding of the project and potential challenges we’ll need to overcome. This means that our in-person discovery sessions can be more focused.

The agenda will be informed by clarifying your business objectives, going deep on areas of the build that require the most due diligence (e.g., mapping our architecture diagrams or reviewing design requirements) and discovery will be focused on creating a pathway forward for the project.

Architecture review – a migration to Shopify is an opportunity to take stock of your current technology stack and question why your business and your eCommerce function operate in the way that it does.

By completing a comprehensive review of your existing architecture and how this interacts with the website, we can find opportunities to improve efficiencies, save costs, and simplify your systems. We’ll use our architecture review as a chance to question the status quo – asking the difficult questions.

User story mapping – by this point in our process, we’ll have a good understanding of your business, the website, and key functionality that we need to deliver as part of the migration. For key functionality or integrations, we’ll then conduct robust user story mapping, to align on both functional and technical requirements.

By going into this level of detail, our designers, engineers, and developers can be confident in the solutions they need to deliver, and you as the client can be confident that we’ve successfully gathered your requirements.

Prototyping solutions – as I’ve already mentioned, migration projects are complex - particularly from a data migration and integrations perspective. 

During discovery we will prototype any key solutions that have a level of complexity or unknowns. The reason for this? Let’s not get into the build and uncover a problem with a proposed solution. Instead, let’s ensure that our approach is watertight up front, and we can move out of discovery with confidence that all functionality and integrations can be achieved - within budget and the required timelines 

Design during discovery – another difference in our process to typical discovery is the fact that we complete design during this phase (and frankly, another reason our discovery process is often more expensive). We do this for a few reasons, with a main one being that it’s important to know not just what we’re delivering technically, but also how the website and its functionality will need to look and interact with your customers.

Another reason is that design can be one of the more subjective areas of a website project. By bringing this into the discovery phase, you as the eCommerce brand and us as the agency partner can be confident that the build is going to achieve what you are looking for.

A technical specification that leaves no stone unturned – the final piece of the discovery puzzle is nailing down our technical specification. This, in essence, is a document that details exactly what we are going to deliver across the whole site. A word of warning: it’s not a document for nighttime reading.

We’ll list all functionality, our solution, any prototyping detail that we have completed, and, where required, references to our website designs. The technical specification will then become the source of truth for the build phase of the project. As the client, you sign-off on the technical specification - and then we’re all agreed on exactly what we deliver.

Project plan – prototypes complete, website designs signed-off, technical specification complete. Now we’re in a position where we can say, with certainty, what we need to deliver, the acceptance criteria that goes along with each piece of functionality, the solutions we’ll be developing, how much data needs to be migrated, and more.

We can now pull together a project plan that we work towards delivering. The project plan is built out into fortnightly sprints, with time estimates against each task, and we know the size of the build and when we will deliver it by.

Transparent conversations, early in the process

As nearly all partners have a budget and timeline that they’re working towards, the robust nature of our discovery phase means that we can have open, honest conversation early on - rather than during the build when it’s almost too late.

We want to remove any uncertainty that all parties may have leaving the RFP stage. What our process does is uncover and resolve those uncertainties before we start the build, so everybody is crystal clear on the approach, our solutions, the budget, and the timelines.

Our aim is to deliver a migration that surpasses expectations and helps our clients achieve their business objectives. The best way to do that is to by being thorough, and where necessary, having pragmatic conversations as soon as possible. 

Migrating to Shopify and need surety?

In-depth discovery is not a negotiable for us. In fact, we’re proud that we’re nearly always the most expensive at this stage.

If you’re an eCommerce business that wants surety of timelines, budgets, and the solutions that will be delivered as part of your migration to Shopify, you know where to find us.