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Educational technology has gained a lot of popularity over the last few years. Just in 2024, the global EdTech market was valued at 163 million USD, and it is expected to grow to 187 million USD in 2025.
By looking at strong market success, many startups and businesses decided to develop their own educational technology projects. However, despite good intentions, some businesses are not successful in developing an EdTech solution of their own.
One of the reasons for this comes from the businesses’ approach: instead of researching the market and defining important parts of the project, they go straight into building a software development project.
Without clearly defined goals and metrics, the development process could go on forever, and the budget will be dried up because of the changes made. Let’s dive deeper into why we need a Discovery phase.
Why do you need the project discovery phase
Good ideas must be fine-tuned before being presented to the target audience. This is why, before diving into the development process, it’s mandatory to research your market and target audience.
The project discovery phase lets you do just that. It helps outline who your users are: their age, their problems, behaviour, and expectations.
But knowing your users is just the first step, the second — knowing your competition.
A deep understanding of how your competitors operate will give you an edge since it gives you insights into strategies and tactics they use.
Knowing how the market does solutions similar to yours and defining your users, you start defining your app. Simply put, this is a stage where you determine the goal and the scope of the EdTech platform.
Not every business understands this importance, which is why they skip the project discovery stage to reach the market faster. Such projects almost always fail or become unfeasible for one of these reasons.
Continuous project scope expansion
To build a successful project, you need to set clear limitations on it, such as time constraints, budget, and overall expectations. The project discovery phase is built around addressing these limitations.
Without it, your project will most likely continuously expand in scope, basically putting the project into “development hell” without a clear indication of when it will be finished.
Climbing costs
The initial planning of your EdTech project will give you an idea of the approximate cost it will require. Without it, the blurred goals and requirements will create a situation where the project constantly changes.
Each change to the initial project results in the development timeline extension and undermines the previous work. The more often this happens, the more expenses you will need to cover the budget.
Unrealistic deadlines
The project discovery phase helps create project milestones, set boundaries and deadlines. As part of the deliverables, it creates a project roadmap with an estimated release date.
Without the discovery phase, the project manager won’t have a clear end goal, meaning the development might extend to a point where it’s not feasible anymore.
Failed expectations
One benefit of the project discovery phase is determining the amount of time and money needed for development. Without a clear indicator of the project’s end goals, the development could continue forever, turning a potentially profitable endeavour into a money sink.
To sum up, the discovery phase saves you from uncertainty and ensures the time and money aren’t wasted. But there are more benefits to it.
How does the project discovery phase benefit the development process
The project discovery phase helps create a clear vision for the project, including features, design, development milestones, deadlines, and a budget.
In a nutshell, this project discovery defines expectations and points out the potential risks or limitations of the future project. In addition, the discovery phase brings the following.
A clear development plan
Project documentation is a broad term for the discovery phase deliverables. Its goal is to set strict project requirements and ensure that every developer and project manager understands what they are working on.
Development roadmap and the budget estimations
Developers need to understand what features the EdTech project will have. In other words, they need a roadmap. It helps developers to understand what features the EdTech project will have.
Based on the deadlines and list of these features, they can prioritise core functionality, and optimise the development process.
Needed talent
Based on the discoveries, businesses will clearly know which specialists they need to develop a project. Knowing in advance how many experts will be involved allows you to distribute the workload and points out potential talent gaps that need to be addressed.
Accelerated development timeline
One of the strong sides of the project discovery phase is that every participant can give their own suggestions and share their vision.
This communication ensures that talent from different departments and their opinions are accounted for, which helps optimise the development.
For example, the collaborative effort between developers and business analysts result in a project that will stay relevant since it will include the latest market changes. And from the developer side, it simplifies the development process.
Project discovery phase deliverables
EdTech is an umbrella term that includes a variety of technologies. Hence, the discovery phase deliverables will vary from one project to another. However, there are four key deliverables.
The vision and scope
This document provides a clear product vision and ensures consistency throughout the project. Think of it as a list that includes business goals, key features, project scope, requirements, etc.
The vision and scope document serves as a foundation for the project.
Design Concept
The project discovery phase outlines the design in addition to the project’s vision. A good UI/UX design balances corporate branding with user-friendliness.
You need to understand your users’ needs to create a good design concept. For example, a design targeted at younger generations will drastically differ from one suitable for older adults.
Architecture Vision
The next important deliverable from the project discovery phase is the project’s architecture. This determines which technologies the project needs, features, and functionalities.
The goal is to assemble an optimal technology stack that meets technical requirements and reduces development costs.
The architecture vision is a broad deliverable that includes key architecture decisions that influence the whole development process, quality attributes, project structure, and infrastructure scheme.
Think of it as a ”skeleton” of your EdTech project.
Project plan and budget
Lastly, the project discovery phase provides cost estimations and the development duration. Cost estimations are self-explanatory, while development duration includes some important details, such as development milestones, roadmap, and schedule.
Steps of the discovery phase
The first stage of the project development is a discovery phase. It consists of six steps.
Step 1: Planning
Discovery planning focuses on getting all relevant information to your project. It usually involves answering questions such as:
- What is the goal your business expects to achieve?
- What needs (or problems) does this project solve?
- Who are the users of your project?
The goal of project discovery planning is to define the objectives of the future software project.
Step 2: Defining goals
This stage identifies and clarifies the project’s needs, expectations, and challenges. Think of it as determining your users’ pain points and how your solution should address them.
Step 3: User journey
User journey focuses on how users will interact with your software. The goal is to create a smooth user experience throughout your project and define the software’s reaction and responses to the user’s actions.
Step 4: Design concepts and wireframes
Based on the previous research, developers create a basic interactive prototype for testing.
Step 5: Development guidelines
At this stage, the business has a good idea of the software’s features and who its users are. Based on this information, the project’s architecture is created.
Step 6: Project finalisation
At the end of the project discovery, you should have a set of documents that contain all the project’s deliverables.
Depending on your EdTech project’s complexity, the discovery phase might take up to six weeks.
Final words
The importance of the discovery phase cannot be overstated. It prevents businesses from facing pitfalls such as unrealistic goals and deadlines, as well as saves projects from turning into money sinks.
The project discovery phase aims to provide you with important insights that ensure a successful outcome and extend the project’s life cycle.
How Altamira can help
Having over 10 years of hands-on experience, Altamira team can turn your EdTech idea into reality.
Our expert developers follow the best practices and have an extensive database of ready-to-use components that let us create prototypes and MVP projects.
During the project discovery phase, we clarify and define all of the requirements for your solution. Our goal is to give you a clear understanding of the project’s scope, minimising uncertainty in favour of a clear budget and timelines.
Get a free expert consultation to learn more about your project idea and how we can make it to life.
