My experience with discovery tools
Background
In the discovery stage, there is a lot of uncertainty and our ideas are still solidifying. Using different tools like MIRO and Atlassian confluence during the discovery stage can help us be on the same page. For me, most of my teams in the last 10 years at least haven’t been colocated and hence we have to use these tools to be on the same page. Luckily for me, there are better tools coming up these days for the same. I will talk about the ones that I have used.
All stages
I typically conduct a design sprint to get started. Especially if your whole team isn’t colocated then you might be using Teams/Zoom for the same. Record the meeting and make use of the AI-generated meeting notes. I find them to be very helpful because you can concentrate on the meeting. If someone isn’t able to make the meeting, they can catchup easily. I copy those notes on Atlassian’s Confluence space. They can comment on the MIRO board and Confluence as needed.
Navigating the uncertainty
I create various boards depending of the problems I am trying to solve in MIRO. Diagramming the workflows and ideas is a creative outlet for the whole team. So, you can either do this manually or use the help of Gen AI, which suggests templates and you can change it as per your preference. 1. Idea Napkin - This is clearly one of my favorites because it builds your elevator pitch and helps the team understand the pain point first before diving into the solution. Sometimes, our dev team dives into building a solution before understanding the problem. This idea napkin is one of my favorites for that reason. 2. Mindmap - I like this because you can then build the big picture easily with the team. Parts of the team can be siloed if they don’t get the whole picture. With this template, you can certainly help them understand whole picture and enable them to determine how they build the architecture. 3. Custom MIRO toolbox - We create custom MIRO boards depending on the product and have used various tools from this toolbox. 4. Atlassian Confluence - I use this for capturing our meeting notes and having team members commment on it as needed.
Final stages of the draft
You can use frames to create a presentation if you have to present it to your management or even just review it as a team. We can then use this as a basis to create a prototype for our customer. We use figma for the same.
Final Thoughts
Using these discovery tools helps you to be scrappy i.e. think together as a team, be creative when you draw different diagrams (Even though some of youor ideas may not be accepted, I enjoyed the process) and have a better chance of success!