Lead Discovery & Framing Engagements
Prepare for and personally facilitate high-value D&F engagements with customer executives, mission leaders, operators, technical stakeholders, acquisition leaders, and other key participants.
Lead the most strategic, complex, or ambiguous engagements while developing additional D&F practitioners to handle increasing volume.
Build the Discovery & Framing Function
Establish the D&F methodology, engagement model, playbook, question bank, templates, quality standards, and examples of what great looks like.
Determine capacity requirements and build the D&F team as demand grows.
Coach and develop D&F practitioners while remaining personally involved in important customer engagements.
Work with the account team before each engagement to establish:
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What remains an assumption
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What decision or next step the engagement needs to advance
The hypothesis provides structure without predetermining the answer.
Discover the Real Problem
Move the customer conversation beyond the initial technical request to understand:
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The mission being performed
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What is not working today
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What happens if nothing changes
Continue asking why until the team understands the underlying mission problem rather than simply the requested technology.
Turn discovery into a clear problem definition the customer recognizes as their own.
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The gap between current and desired states
The problem should be expressed in the customer’s language—not Defense Unicorns product language.
Make the Impact Measurable
Quantify the problem wherever possible using measures such as:
Establish a baseline so the customer can determine whether the problem has actually been solved.
Help the customer establish the outcomes and success criteria that indicate meaningful improvement.
How will we know it changed?
Identify the people and organizations involved in moving the problem toward action, including:
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People who can advance the decision
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People who can block the decision
Understand the relationships, incentives, concerns, and gaps among them.
Expose the Path to Action
Determine what must happen for the customer to act, including:
Own the Customer-Facing Output
Every D&F engagement should result in a concise, customer-ready readout.
The Head of D&F owns the quality of these outputs across the function.
Each output should include:
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Validated mission problem
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Current state and root causes
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Stakeholder and buying map
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Decision criteria and process
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Funding and acquisition path
The output should be useful enough that the customer and account team can act on it immediately.
Maintain Independence of Judgment
Discovery & Framing is not a disguised product pitch.
The D&F function objectively determines whether a meaningful problem exists, whether solving it matters, and whether Defense Unicorns has a credible role in helping address it.
A successful D&F engagement may:
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Identify additional discovery required
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Reveal that another problem should take priority
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Disqualify an opportunity