Discovery Driven Planning Template

Discovery Driven Planning Template - Excel XLS Template

Discovery Driven Planning Training Video

Discovery Driven Planning Best Practices

Discovery Driven Planning is a business process tool that distinguishes between traditional business planning and the planning required for new business ventures. Whereas traditional planning processes focus on clear goals with specific projections, Discovery Driven Planning can be used for internal corporate ventures and start-ups where the future is highly uncertain and contains many assumptions.

More about Discovery Driven Planning

Description of Discovery Driven Planning

Discovery Driven Planning was originally introduced by Rita McGrath and Ian McMillan in Harvard Business Review. Since then, many teams, organizations, and consultants have adapted and developed tools and templates to support their business processes. Discovery Driven Planning contains five key components:

  • Definition of success
  • Market and competitive benchmarking
  • Definition of operational requirements
  • Documentation of assumptions
  • Definition of key checkpoints

Praxie's Online Discovery Driven Planning Tools & Templates

Business leaders who want to drive better decision-making within their organization should try the new online Discovery Driven Planning template from Praxie. The Discovery Driven Planning framework is a planning and learning system that helps leaders and strategy teams systematically convert assumptions to knowledge so that they can access opportunities while taking calculated risks. Ultimately, using the Discovery Driven Planning Template enables business leaders to lower the risk of moving a product forward in the face of what is unknown or uncertain. The Discovery Driven Planning Template helps business leaders identify who the core owners are for specific elements of a long-term initiative (for example, who is the owner of Business Model planning?), what strategies should be used to address each area, what assumptions are being made, how critical is the success of this factor, and what is the time horizon for completion.  

Upon completely filling out this template, business leaders are much more able to determine which goals and actions are most important for bringing forward a project, idea, or initiative. Get started with our Discovery Driven Planning template.  

How to use it: 

  1. List the key strategies and assumptions for each element of your plan.  
  2. Score each element based on your level of confidence in your assumption and the criticality of that assumption for your overall success.  
  3. Define action plans to test your most important assumptions.  
  4. Update this template as needed over time to track your plan and assumptions. 

Unlike most traditional Discovery Driven Planning strategy techniques, Praxie’s online Discovery Driven Planning collaboration tools allow any team or organization to instantly begin working with our web templates and input forms. Our digital platform goes far beyond other software tools by including progress dashboards, data integration from existing documents or other SaaS software, elegant intuitive designs, and full access on any desktop or mobile device.