1. Discover & Research

Every engagement starts here, before any screens get drawn. I go through what you already have — support tickets, sales calls, old research, whatever's lying around — then add what's missing: customer interviews, competitor teardowns, a look at how people are actually working around your product today. The goal isn't a slide deck. It's a shortlist of problems worth solving, ranked by how often they show up and what they're costing you.

You get a short, plain-English brief: the patterns that kept surfacing, who they affect, and a rough sense of impact. No 40-page report nobody reads. It's the input the next stage — Ideate & Design — works from, so nothing gets designed against a guess.

In practice, that's a one-page brief plus a prioritised list of problems — not a research binder nobody opens again.