Discovery and definition
Work opens with objectives, users, constraints and the risks that could derail delivery. This stage exists to reduce uncertainty before scope expands, and it produces a written product definition: what is being built, for whom, what is explicitly out of scope, and what success would look like. Where the shape of the product is genuinely unclear, a prototype settles the argument faster than a document. The output is a plan specific enough to price and to disagree with, which is the point.