Published on the Range Blog in 2018

If you reach out to Range for an estimate, you’ll probably receive a quote that includes “Discovery.” It’s a fun, albeit nebulous, word that means our team works with you to unearth important information.

What is Discovery?

It looks different from project to project but the basic approach is the same. Our team brings questions and your team brings responses. Then we talk through the gray or tricky stuff together. At the end, everyone has a better idea of where to go and how to get there.

This is where the term Discovery comes from – our team discovers more about your business, pain points and how we can help. Your team discovers more about how we work and how we’d like to solve your frustrations. Most of our clients walk away understanding their own goals, audience and brand better than before.

What happens in Discovery?

Our team brings up topics like:

• Your business: Stories are powerful and, in the first part of Discovery, our team wants to hear the true story of how your business or idea came about. We also want to hear about the problem(s) you’re solving and your ideas for the future.
• Your audience: When our team asks about your Audience, we’re asking about the people who interact with your brand and the people you’d like to interact with your brand. We want to hear what they love, what they hate and what they particularly love about you.
• Your brand: A lot of our clients don’t have detailed brand guidelines and that’s okay. When our team brings up your brand, we’ll ask you about who you are now and who you’d like to be a few years from now. We’ll also ask you to describe your brand personality. For example, are you more serious or more playful?
• Content: The words on your site are pretty important. And, for a lot of our clients, so is the content on their blog. Our team asks a lot of questions about content strategy, goals and voice. It helps us get to know your brand better and make sure your website advances your content, not hinders it.

There are a lot more questions we can (and do) ask, but these are the basics for most projects.

What’s the result?

In addition to some unquantifiable momentum, Discovery clearly outlines Big Problems and how to fix them in the context of your business, brand, audience, and content. Chances are we’ve solved your Big Problem before; Discovery helps our team know how to solve it in your unique setting.

In terms of deliverables (an output our team gives to you), that looks like Site Goals or terms of success. It can also look like audience profiles or user workflows, depending on your project.

Why does it matter?

The deliverables that come out of Discovery are things our team and your team will reference throughout the rest of the project. Site goals help our team determine whether a new feature or design element is worth including. Audience profiles help determine whether landing pages meet customer needs. Our team checks both of these often to make sure your project is heading in the right direction.

Discovery is valuable for what it provides, but it’s also valuable for what it prevents. A detailed conversation at the beginning of the project helps prevent questions like, “why wasn’t this discussed earlier?” and “how come no one knew about this requirement?”.

Do you do any projects without this?

On very rare occasions, yes. Usually, no. And really, we don’t ever want to skip discovery. Neither do our clients. Discovery meetings are fun (as in actually fun, not just endurable) and they motivate every team member to do their piece. Even if most of the information our team would ask for is already available, we don’t want to skip the opportunity to get to know you and kick things off on a good note.

Can you answer more Discovery questions?

You bet! If you have more questions, give us a shout. We’d love to chat about our process and what this piece looks like.

Posted on the Range Blog in 2017
This post could come across as anti-productivity. To be clear, I’m all for productivity. I think my team and I have amazing skills that we can and should optimize this week.

What I am not for is haphazard productivity – the pursuit of crossing something off a todo list as fast as possible (just because it’s there) to get to the next item (just because it’s there).

If we have a limited amount of mental and physical energy each day, I want my team working on the right tasks and some meaningful end goal. I want our productivity to be purpose-driven.

What most posts don’t mention

But most productivity posts I read don’t focus on why we should be productive. They’re full of 12 secrets or 7 steps or 5 ways to squeeze every minute of a work day. And while many of these articles actually are full of very good and helpful tips, they don’t hone in on the purpose of our productivity. They don’t start with why.

Instead, they make a handful of assumptions.

Productivity assumptions

Most authors assume your answer to “why should I be productive?” is one of the following:

1. You’d like a raise. “Do more, make more” is an unwritten mantra in your company so you hustle to do more.
2. You enjoy the feeling of being productive. Completing tasks boosts your self-esteem so you check off every box you can find.
3. There’s something else you’d rather be doing. You’re in it to win it…just not at your day job. You knock work out fast so you can spend more time elsewhere.
4. You crave control. Sure, you’d like to be more productive, but what you’re really after here is controlling your time as much as possible.
5. You’d like relief. Your work day feels something like drowning and if someone could just throw you a life ring, that’d be great.

I don’t think many of these reasons, these whys, are inherently awful, but a lot of them look like they have bad side effects. For example, burnout seems imminent with the first two whys. And the third and fourth? They don’t necessarily lead to better work, just to treading water.

Is that where we want all this cultivated time and energy to lead – to burnouts or treading water, just-barely-surviving?

The big what-if

What if we started with more meaningful, more purposeful whys?

What if our productivity hinged on these kind of whys:

• Our work has a significant and positive impact on our teams, and we want to optimize that.
• Our efforts are part of a larger, meaningful company vision and we care to advance it.
• The things we create impact society in a good way and we want to spread good influence.
• What we produce paves the way for others to succeed and we want to construct a clear and helpful path.

What might we produce if we did more for these kind of reasons as opposed to crossing off to-dos for the first kind of reasons? Where might our work lead us?

Give a purpose-driven approach a try. Identify a distinct purpose for your efforts, put all those good tips to work, and see if you and your team can’t accomplish some seriously meaningful goals.