Understand
We ask the right questions and discover what matters to you and the people who will use your product.
Before anything is designed we find out how the work is done now, including the parts that never made it into a process document. This is the cheapest stage to be wrong in, so we spend it deliberately.
You get:a workflow map + an agreed success metric
Sessions with the people doing the work
We talk to the operators, not only the sponsors. The constraint that decides the whole design is usually held by someone who was not in the kickoff.
One success metric, agreed in writing
We name the number that has to move before we design anything to move it. It settles scope arguments later, at the point where they get expensive.