Every stage produces something you can review, question and stop. If a project is going wrong you should find that out at the end of a two-week stage, not at the end of a six-month build.
We map the operational problem, the people who live with it and the metric that would prove it solved, then cut scope to what can actually ship. Most discovery work is subtraction.
Complete flows for every user type, prototyped and tested before a line of production code. We design the empty, loading, error and offline states too, because that is where most products fall apart.
Designs become real, interactive product. Web and native builds go onto real devices from week one, so the feedback loop runs against something you can hold rather than a slide.
APIs, data models, authentication and integrations. We settle the tenancy and permission model early because everything downstream inherits from it, and retrofitting it is expensive.
End-to-end tests across real devices and environments, load testing against realistic volumes, and a security pass. Bugs get found here rather than by your users in week one.
App stores, cloud or on-premise, deployed with monitoring, alerting and a rollback plan written before it is needed. Rollout is staged, never a single switch.
Hosting, updates, fixes and new features, or a clean handover to your own team with the documentation to make that realistic. Both are normal endings.
Discovery is fixed-scope and produces a written output. If that document says you should not build the thing, that is a good result, and the project ends there.