Why Discoveries Fail (and How to Stop it Happening to You)

Most of us don’t get the luxury of testing lots of ideas during our Discovery. We get one shot. Maybe two. The rest of the time, we can feel stuck trying to make something work that never should’ve made it out of PowerPoint.

So the big question is: How do you spot a doomed idea before you commit to it? And better still, how do you build a discovery process that avoids the build trap altogether? Here’s what I’ve learned, the hard way. Three stories: One prison. One startup. One wig for a cat.

1. What I Learned in Wandsworth Prison

Back in 2011, I worked for a social enterprise that chased funding rounds like oxygen. We were a startup with a mission, and our whole model was built around winning grants and using that money to create social impact.

The problem? We were often pitching solutions at the exact moment we knew the least about the problem. Funders would back us based on a good-sounding idea. But when that idea met reality, it wobbled. We’d find ourselves delivering services that looked good on paper, but missed the mark in practice. Value drained out. Ethics suffered. Everyone got tired.

So we tried something different. We pitched for a small grant from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, not to build a product but to fund our discovery. Just a few days to test the riskiest assumptions behind each idea, before pitching for money.

One of those ideas was a website of inspirational videos to help people leaving prison find work. Sounded good. Fundable. Everyone liked it. But I used our discovery grant to test it and spent three days doing fieldwork:

• A day inside Wandsworth Prison, sitting in career sessions with inmates
  
• A day with people who’d recently left prison
  
• A day shadowing careers advisors in the community
  

What I found changed everything. People who’d just left prison weren’t looking for videos. Most were looking for a place to live and enough money to get by. But they were having mandatory meetings with Jobcentre staff who were struggling to give good advice on applying for jobs with a criminal conviction. Even worse, the rules on disclosure had just changed, and nobody understood them. Including the advisors.

So we scrapped the videos. Instead, we pitched a plain-language website for advisors, with printable handouts they could give to clients. A simpler service, for less money — but with a full year of support baked in. That site eventually ended up on GOV.UK.

The lesson? Early discovery saves ideas from themselves. The good ones get better. The weak ones die quickly, before they can waste anyone’s time.

2. The Startup That Didn’t Make It

Fast forward to 2014. I’m running a product consultancy, helping founders build and test their business models.

A client asks me to help shape their roadmap. They’ve got investment from a telecoms company to build an algorithm-powered job site for young people without formal qualifications. The idea: help them showcase informal skills and connect with employers.

I run a discovery:

• Interview the founder
  
• Interview their team
  
• Interview their commercial customers
  
• Interview their users
  

What I find is brutal. The business model is broken.

The real value wasn’t the algorithm. It was the founder. They had trusted relationships with charities who would put forward their best volunteers, and with Corporate Social Responsibility teams in large commercial companies who wanted to meet CSR commitments (note: not HR teams responsible for hiring in general). They were acting as a trusted matchmaker, not a platform provider.

The investors wanted software. But the business needed people. All the funding was locked up in engineering salaries. There was no money to hire operational staff to support placements, which was the actual thing creating value.

I told the founder I couldn’t in good conscience take their money. I didn’t think the model was viable. We parted ways. A few months later, they messaged me. They’d returned the investment, shut down the company, and taken a job. They were going to be a parent, and they were finally drawing a salary again. They said, “I was angry at the time. But you were right. Thank you.”

The lesson? A good idea without a viable business model is just a hobby. And sometimes, the wrong kind of funding can kill a good idea before it has a chance to grow.

3. The Cat Wig Scale

One year later, I’m teaching on a 10-week product management course. Every student brings their own product idea. They spend the course developing it using discovery, user research, and lean startup methods to test and refine. And like clockwork, at week 3 or 4, a pattern emerges.

Everyone hits the same wall:

• No access to users
  
• Solving the wrong problem for the wrong person
  
• Or the most common: nobody cares about the thing you’re building
  

To help with that last one, we started using a metaphor: the cat wig scale from Libby Miller.

Here’s how it works:

Level	Description	Example
🧪 Antibiotics	Life-saving, urgent, global demand	Healthcare, essential services
🚪 Garage Doors	Useful, niche, practical need	Mid-sized profitable businesses
🐱 Cat Wigs	Fun, but no real demand	Novelty, hobby, low-revenue

If your idea sits in “cat wig” territory, that’s fine but it’s a reality check. You probably don’t want to quit your job and pin your hopes on it. And if you’re not sure what level you’re at, discovery helps you find out: early, before you hire, before you ship, before you waste months of your life.

The lesson? People have to care enough about the problem you’re solving. Otherwise, you’ve got a hobby, not a viable product or service.

Why This Matters

Discovery is meant to de-risk delivery. But it can become a performance. We write up flashy ideas. We put them in decks. We fall in love.By the time we “test” them, the stakes are already too high to kill them. So they shamble forward. Slow. Stuck. Zombie ideas eating real budgets.

I’ve reviewed over 50 discoveries across government, startups, charities and education. The same patterns come up again and again:

• We commit to solutions too early
  
• We know the least at the point we make the biggest bets
  
• We treat discovery as a phase, not a practice
  

And we forget: clarity comes from movement, not more slides.

Tools That Help: Our Approach to De-Risking Discovery

Here’s what I use now, whether reviewing ideas or coaching teams:

Having seen countless discovery efforts veer off course, we’ve developed a clear, judgment-led approach to bring teams back to what truly matters. At Herd, we don’t just talk about “Discovery”; we focus on helping you make decisions: ensuring every insight directly informs a critical choice that moves you forward. These are the foundational principles we embed to achieve radical focus in discovery:

1. Ask Three Simple Questions:
   1. Is it desirable: Do people want this? (users and the organisation) 
   2. Is it viable: Are we the right people to do it? 
   3. Is it feasible: Can we actually deliver it? 

These questions cut through the noise, forcing early confrontation with reality. 

2. Test the Riskiest Assumption First: Most teams focus on the obvious. We guide our clients to identify the single biggest unknown – the one thing that, if false, invalidates everything. Test that, cheaply and quickly. This is where **Radical Focus** truly shines, preventing wasted effort. 
3. Lower the Cost of Being Wrong: We advocate for small, rapid experiments over grand pronouncements. It’s about building in quick feedback loops and **rewarding reality checks**. If you can learn a critical lesson for a few hundred pounds instead of a few million, you’ve won. This isn’t about avoiding failure; it’s about making failure a cheap and fast learning opportunity.

My Take: Embrace the Hard Truths for Real Progress

Discovery isn’t ‘just a phase’. It’s about valuing truth over comfort, no matter how inconvenient. It means being ruthlessly pragmatic about what’s actually desirable, viable & feasible, rather than pursuing every shiny new idea.

The goal isn’t just to find ideas, but to allow confident, judgment-led decisions that align with your strategic objectives. This is where most organizations falter: they lack the embedded leadership and clear decision frameworks to truly act on discovery insights.

How Herd Helps You Succeed in Discovery

At Herd, we don’t just offer advice; we embed the expertise and build the capabilities to transform your approach to discovery and decision-making. We help our clients to uncover the ideas truly worth pursuing, and critically, to recognize the ones that won’t work – before they cost you dearly. 

We do this through: 

• Fractional Senior Product Leadership: Embedding an experienced product leader directly into your high-stakes programs to steer strategy and lead outcome-focused decision-making. We bring the judgment and radical focus required to cut through complexity and unblock initiatives. 
• Radical Focus & Decision Enablement Coaching: Deploying targeted, embedded product-thinking to unblock stalled work by identifying and enabling the key, often difficult, decisions that genuinely move things forward. This is where we put those “Tools That Help” into practice, transforming your team’s approach.
• Product Leadership Development & Operating Model Enablement: We mentor and coach your existing product leaders and teams, helping them to build and execute a robust product operating model that integrates effective discovery practices. 

Ready to stop repeating the cycle of failed discoveries and start building what truly matters?  

Let’s Talk About Your Next Big Idea 

If you’re grappling with stalled projects, unclear decisions, or the feeling that your discovery efforts aren’t hitting the mark, we should talk. We offer a complimentary 30-minute discovery session to understand your unique challenges and explore how Herd’s judgement-led approach can bring clarity and radical focus to your initiatives. 

• Book Your Complimentary Discovery Session
• You can also see my talk on Discovery at Leeds Digital Festival here.

Over To You

When you look at the most recent Discovery you’ve seen or done:

• Was it clear that people urgently wanted help?
• Did you map the business model sitting underneath your idea?
• Were you led by testing the riskiest assumptions about your idea?

I’d love to hear your reflections. Hit reply, leave a comment, or share your Discovery lessons with others.

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🖊️ Authored by: Scott Colfer

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