It’s now possible to build and improve services faster than traditional approaches allowed. However, that capability can create pressure to start building before a team fully understands the problem it needs to solve.
In central government, this tension is very real. Teams working under time pressure sometimes move into build before discovery is complete; services get built quickly and they solve the wrong problem or miss critical user needs. The result is rework, frustrated teams, and services that don’t improve outcomes. In government, this also means precious budget wasted on solutions that don’t deliver, compliance risks, and citizens struggling with services never designed for their real needs.
Why stepping back matters
In our work with government organisations, we run discovery and user research early, before significant investment is made in build. When you engage the users actually doing the work and map how the service flows end to end, you start to see where policy, operations and digital create friction. That understanding gives teams clarity on whether their original instinct is sound, or whether a completely different approach would have more impact.
The GDS Service Standard reinforces this: understanding users and their needs is the first of 14 criteria all government digital services should meet. The reason it is first is not bureaucracy, it is because everything else depends on it. That understanding must shape decisions from the outset, not become a compliance check at the end.
The discovery that changed direction
We recently worked with a client on improving their internal communications.
Before moving to build, we asked the team to pause and talk to the people actually doing the work. When we did, what we found totally shifted our thinking. User research revealed that the real bottleneck wasn’t communication systems, it was how legal mail was processed. Staff were spending days moving documents through manual workflows. That’s where the friction actually was.
What we discovered altered their thinking too. The solution they had designed was clever, but it was solving a symptom rather than addressing the real issue. Instead of building communication tools, we focused on redesigning legal mail processing to be digital-first.
The result was dramatic: legal mail processing went from four to five days to approximately 30 seconds per item. Staff efficiency improved significantly, and the throughput increase meant accessing legal support became faster.
The practical outcome
In our practical experience, organisations that want to move at pace need to invest in understanding the problem first. The teams that move fastest are not the ones with the most advanced tools, they are the ones with the clearest picture of what problem they are solving. That’s the true value of discovery and user research.
