The agency wants to start the rebuild. The marketing lead wants to start the rebuild. The partners want to start the rebuild. Six months later, the project is over budget, three months late and not doing what the partners thought it would do.
This is what happens when “we need a new website” is treated as the brief.
I’ve sat in front of more than one of those projects in the last few years, after they’ve gone sideways. The pattern is the same. The agency was told to start. They priced what they could see. The bits they couldn’t see, like personas, user journeys, content matrix, CMS evaluation and measurement framework, got built during the project as billable work. As change orders. As scope creep dressed up as discovery.
That work should have happened before any agency was briefed.
What discovery actually is
Discovery isn’t a kick off meeting. It isn’t a workshop. It isn’t a deck of moodboards. It’s the document that goes in front of the agency on day one and answers the questions the agency would otherwise ask in their second week. Who is this site for. What are they trying to do. What do we want them to do. What are we measuring. What’s the structure of the content. What platform is it built on. What’s the budget.
Get those answers down on paper before you brief an agency and you’ll get back agency responses that are actually comparable. Don’t, and you’ll get back four wildly different proposals, three of which are guessing about the bits you didn’t specify.
The cost of doing discovery first is a fraction of the cost of doing discovery during the build. The cost of doing discovery during the build is rarely visible until the change orders start arriving.
What I find when I run discovery for a law firm
The same set of gaps, almost every time.
The personas are five years old and were written by an agency for a different project. Nobody refers to them. Nobody knows where the file is. When you go and ask the BD team and the senior partners what their actual clients look like, you get a different answer than the persona file says.
The user journeys are aspirational. They describe what the partners wish people would do on the site. They don’t describe what people actually do. The actual journeys start with a Google search for a named lawyer and end on a profile page. Half the pages the partners think are doing the work aren’t even on the path.
The measurement framework is a slide from the agency’s quarterly report. It measures what the agency knows how to measure. It doesn’t measure what the firm needs to defend in a partner meeting.
The CMS is a topic nobody at the firm has the time to evaluate properly. The default is the platform the current agency builds on. The choice gets made because nobody pushed back, not because anyone asked which platform fits the firm.
The site structure follows the org chart. Every practice area has a top level page because every practice area lobbied for one. The user has to translate the firm’s structure into their own question. Most users won’t.
What discovery looks like when it’s done properly
It takes between three and six months. Most of that time is interviews, audits and workshops with people inside the firm. A smaller part is competitor benchmarking and best practice review. The deliverable is a document, between fifteen and forty pages, that the marketing lead can put in front of an agency and say: build to this.
Five personas, named, with priorities. Three user journeys per persona. A content matrix of every page on the existing site, tagged for reuse or retirement. A site structure based on the journeys, not the org chart. A CMS recommendation with reasons. A measurement framework with KPIs that mean something. An RFP that asks the right questions in the right way.
The document is the brief. The agency builds against the brief. The change orders, when they come, are small. The budget holds. The site lands on time.
Why it doesn’t happen
Because nobody at the firm has the time. Because nobody on the agency side benefits from doing it first. Because doing it properly requires somebody in the room who isn’t trying to sell anything.
If you’re a marketing lead reading this, the test is simple. Open the document the agency is using as their working brief. Read it cold. If you can’t answer “who is this site for, in priority order, with specific examples” from that document, you don’t have a brief yet. You have a starting point for one.
The good news is that this is fixable in months, not years, and at a fraction of the cost of the build.