What to Prepare Before a Software Discovery Call
A good discovery call depends less on a polished pitch deck and more on a few concrete details about how your team actually works today.
The most useful discovery calls aren't the ones where a business arrives with a fully-specified feature list — they're the ones where we can see how work actually happens today, including the messy, manual parts.
Before a call, it helps to have a rough sense of three things: what the current process looks like (even if it's a spreadsheet and a few phone calls), who touches the process at each step, and what specifically is costing time or causing errors right now.
It's also useful to know what systems already exist — even ones you're not planning to replace. A surprising amount of early scope discussion is really about how a new system will talk to an old one, not about the new system itself.
You don't need answers to everything. Part of what discovery is for is turning a vague sense of 'this process is painful' into a concrete, buildable plan — that's a collaborative process, not something you need to arrive having already solved.