Every engagement at Advancyst starts with a discovery sprint before a single screen gets designed. It's tempting to skip straight to building — clients are usually eager to see something visual — but the projects that go wrong are almost always the ones where nobody agreed on the actual problem first.
Our discovery sprint runs on a fixed timebox, not an open-ended research phase. That constraint matters: unlimited discovery time turns into unlimited discovery time. A fixed window forces the team to prioritize the handful of questions that actually change the build, instead of gathering context indefinitely.
We structure it around three questions: what is the system actually for, who does it need to work for on their worst day (not their best), and what does 'done' mean in a way that can be checked objectively. Everything else — mood boards, competitor scans, tech spikes — exists to answer those three questions faster.
The output isn't a deck. It's a short, specific brief that the whole team, including the client, signs off on before design starts. That document becomes the thing we point back to when scope conversations get fuzzy later — which they always do.