Discovery Phase

Discovery is the first phase of every Audra Flow project. Its purpose is simple: figure out why you are building something before you decide what to build. During Discovery you will capture business goals, talk to the people who matter most, study the competitive landscape, and let AI help you make sense of it all.

Everything you create in Discovery — goals, interviews, and competitor profiles — carries forward into the later phases. When you eventually write personas, define use cases, or plan your architecture, Audra Flow traces each decision back to the research you did here.

Overview

Think of Discovery as the foundation for your product. If you skip it or rush through it, later phases will be built on assumptions instead of evidence. A solid Discovery phase answers three questions:

1. What problem are we solving? — Clearly state the pain point or opportunity that justifies this project.
2. Who are we solving it for? — Identify the people, teams, or market segments that will benefit.
3. How will we know we succeeded? — Define measurable outcomes so you can track progress once you start building.

Audra Flow gives you three artifact types to answer those questions: Goals & Objectives, Stakeholder Interviews, and Competitor Analysis. Each one has its own workspace panel, version history, and status tracking (Draft, In Progress, Complete).

Setting Goals & Objectives

Goals are the backbone of your project. They describe the outcomes you want to achieve in plain language and connect to measurable indicators that keep the team honest.

Creating a Goal

1. Open your project and navigate to the Discovery phase in the sidebar.
2. Click Goals & Objectives.
3. Click Add Goal and give it a clear, outcome-focused title — for example, “Reduce customer onboarding time by 40%.”
4. Add a description that explains the context: why this goal matters, who it affects, and what success looks like.

Priorities and KPIs

Every goal can be assigned a priority level (Critical, High, Medium, Low) and one or more Key Performance Indicators. KPIs turn vague ambitions into numbers you can track:

How Goals Trace Forward

Goals are not isolated. When you move into the Definition phase, each persona, use case, and user journey can be linked back to one or more Discovery goals. In Design & Delivery, user stories and architectural decisions reference those same goals. This end-to-end traceability means you can always answer the question: “Why did we build this?”

Stakeholder Interviews

The best product decisions are informed by real conversations. Stakeholder Interviews in Audra Flow let you capture who you spoke with, what you learned, and what it means for the product.

Creating an Interview Record

1. In the Discovery phase, click Stakeholder Interviews.
2. Click Add Interview.
3. Fill in the basic details: interviewee name, role, date, and the interview format (in-person, video call, survey, etc.).
4. Write up your findings in the Key Findings section. Focus on what the person said that surprised you, confirmed a hypothesis, or raised a new question.

Capturing Rich Findings

Each interview record has space for:

• Summary — A short paragraph capturing the overall takeaway from the conversation.
• Key Findings — Bullet-pointed insights that stand on their own, so teammates who were not present can quickly scan the results.
• Quotes — Direct quotes that bring the stakeholder's voice into your documentation. These are especially powerful when presenting to leadership.
• Action Items — Concrete next steps that came out of the conversation.

Synthesising with the UX Researcher

Once you have recorded several interviews, the AI can help you see the bigger picture. Open the UX Researcher agent from the chat panel and ask it to:

• “Summarise the top three themes across all interviews.”
• “Which pain points were mentioned by more than one stakeholder?”
• “Draft a research summary I can share with leadership.”

The UX Researcher reads your interview data within the project context, so its answers are grounded in what your stakeholders actually said — not generic advice.

Competitor Analysis

Understanding the competitive landscape helps you find gaps worth filling and avoid reinventing what already exists. Audra Flow provides a structured way to document each competitor.

Creating a Competitor Entry

1. In the Discovery phase, click Competitor Analysis.
2. Click Add Competitor.
3. Enter the competitor's name and website.

Fields That Matter

Each competitor entry includes the following sections. You do not need to fill everything in at once — start with what you know and refine over time:

AI-Assisted Competitive Analysis

The UX Researcher agent can help you get a head start on competitor research. Try prompts like:

• “Based on the competitor entries I've added, where is the biggest gap in the market?”
• “Compare the strengths of Competitor A and Competitor B and suggest differentiation opportunities.”
• “Generate a competitive landscape summary I can include in a stakeholder presentation.”

If you have uploaded market research reports or analyst documents to the project knowledge base, the AI will incorporate those sources into its analysis for richer, more specific insights.

Using AI in Discovery

The UX Researcher agent is your primary AI assistant during Discovery. It is specifically tuned for research synthesis, pattern recognition, and turning raw data into actionable insights. Here are the most effective ways to use it:

Summarise Interview Themes

After conducting three or more interviews, ask the UX Researcher to identify recurring themes. It will group findings by topic, highlight contradictions between stakeholders, and flag areas that need more research.

Try this: “Summarise the key themes from my stakeholder interviews and rank them by how many people mentioned each one.”

Generate Goal Suggestions

If you have uploaded documents — business cases, strategy decks, customer feedback reports — the UX Researcher can suggest goals based on what it finds in those files. This is a great way to make sure you are not overlooking something important.

Try this: “Based on the documents in this project, suggest five goals with measurable KPIs.”

Draft Research Summaries

Need to present your Discovery findings to leadership or a steering committee? Ask the AI to draft a summary that pulls together goals, interview highlights, and competitive insights into a coherent narrative.

Try this: “Write a one-page Discovery summary covering our goals, interview findings, and competitive landscape.”

Identify Gaps

The UX Researcher can review your Discovery artifacts and point out what is missing. Maybe you set goals but never captured KPIs, or you interviewed internal stakeholders but no actual end users.

Try this: “Review my Discovery phase and tell me what gaps I should fill before moving to Definition.”

When to Move to Definition

There is no hard rule about when Discovery is “done,” but the following checklist will help you decide if you are ready. If you can check off most of these items, you have a strong enough foundation to start defining your product:

• You have at least one clearly stated goal with a measurable KPI.
• You have conducted interviews with key stakeholders and captured findings for each one.
• You have documented at least your primary competitors with strengths, weaknesses, and differentiation opportunities.
• Your team has reviewed the Discovery artifacts and agrees on the problem space.
• There are no major open questions that would block you from writing personas or use cases.
• All Discovery artifacts are set to Complete status (or deliberately marked as ongoing for items you plan to revisit).

Tip: You can always come back to Discovery later. Audra Flow does not lock phases — you can update goals or add new interviews at any point. But having a solid baseline before moving on will save you from rework down the line.

Next Steps

Once your Discovery phase is in good shape, it is time to transform those insights into structured product definitions. In the Definition phase, you will create personas, map user journeys, write use cases, and build the blueprint for what you are going to build.

• Definition Phase — Learn how to turn Discovery insights into personas, use cases, journeys, and more.
• Working with AI Agents — Explore all four AI agents and how they assist across every phase.
• Knowledge Base & Documents — Upload research documents to give AI agents richer context for your project.