What a Discovery Call With a Dev Agency Should Actually Cover

A discovery call that only covers budget and timeline hasn't actually scoped anything — those are constraints, not the project itself. Real discovery starts with goals, users, and constraints, and only produces a scope and estimate once those are actually understood.

• Discovery — align on goals, users, and constraints before anything gets scoped.
• Planning — scope, stack, data model, and milestones, mapped before development starts.
• Design — high-fidelity prototypes reviewed with you so the product feels right early, not after it's built.
• Development — two-week sprints with regular demos and staging previews.
• QA — automated tests, manual QA, performance and security review before release.
• Launch — zero-downtime deployment with CI/CD and monitoring in place.
• Maintenance — ongoing support, iteration, and scaling as the product grows.

This is the same process published on our own /services page — this post exists to explain why each stage is there, not just list it.

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