De-mystifying client discovery

It's the very first meeting with your shiny new client. A blank slate, the opening steps of a potentially year-plus long project. This is where it all begins: discovery. Such a simple word for multiple day-long meetings designed to suck all the information possible out of the client before starting to architect the site and getting things ready for development. For me it is easily the best part of any project, yet many developers view this phase of the project as a burden - the yawn-inducing boredom before we get to the real work of coding. It require real technical know-how, but it is also as much art as science.

A lot of devs get thrown into this process with no framework or roadmap of how to manage it. This talk will give them one, covering the following topics

• What are the most important architectural questions you need to answer?
• Why are architectural questions almost the least important aspects of discovery?
• What is your role in the process (both the role they think you're playing and the role you're really playing)?
• What can you do to make the transition from discovery to build a success?