Product Discovery
Research, workshops, user testing, and discovery methodology — turning ambiguous business needs into clear, actionable design direction.
The Challenge
Business teams often arrive with a clear vision of what they want built — but struggle to define the underlying requirements or articulate the user journeys that the product needs to support. Without a shared framework, design and development teams move in different directions, resulting in products that miss the mark for real users.
The discovery process needed to bridge this gap: transforming rough business intent into structured, evidence-backed design direction that every stakeholder could align on.
The Solution
We established a repeatable discovery practice across all EY Assurance product teams — combining facilitated workshops, user research, and collaborative synthesis to build a shared understanding of user needs before a single screen was designed.
By working alongside product owners and business analysts from the earliest stages, the discovery process ensures that the right problems are being solved — not just the ones that are easiest to articulate.
Discovery Methodology
Every discovery engagement follows a structured arc — from alignment and immersion through synthesis and activation — giving teams a clear path from ambiguous problem to actionable design strategy.
- Stakeholder alignment workshops Aligning business goals, user needs, and technical constraints in a single session
- User interviews & contextual inquiry Going where users work to understand real behaviors, workarounds, and pain points
- Journey mapping Visualizing the full end-to-end user experience to reveal gaps and opportunities
- Persona development Creating behavioral archetypes that ground design decisions in real user data
- Usability testing Validating concepts early and often with real users before committing to development
Research in Practice
Discovery work is not a one-time gate — it's embedded throughout the product lifecycle. At EY, we run lightweight discovery sprints at each major milestone: before feature definition, after prototype validation, and when new user signals emerge from production.
This continuous approach keeps design grounded in user reality and gives product teams the confidence to make informed trade-off decisions at every stage of development.
"Pratt and I worked together for several years on EY's global audit platform - EY Canvas. During this time, Pratt served as a leader within our team as well as on the broader EY Canvas project. He instituted processes that improved the coordination between XD, Product, and Engineering. As a result, we were able to spend more time on concept development and ideation, leading to more thoughtful solutions for end users (auditors and clients)."
