Discovery Workshop

Engineering led workshops that turn a product idea into a buildable specification

You have a product to develop, internal stakeholders to satisfy and limited tolerance for the cost and time consequences of building from a vague brief. A Discovery Workshop brings Ignys engineers and your team into the same room to settle the high-level technology and architecture decisions, and to have a a measurable, numbered Product Requirement Specification drafted in the days afterwards that your development project can actually be built from.

Where electronics projects are won or lost

Most electronics projects don’t fail because of the clever bits being hard. They fail because the specification was vague, the technology decisions were left to be made later and later turned out to be the worst possible time to make them.

By the time a design team is laying out boards or writing firmware, the cost of changing direction has multiplied. A platform choice that was a discussion at week 2 becomes a PCB re-spin at week 22. A performance requirement that wasn’t pinned down at the start becomes a customer dispute at field trial. A radio choice that was reasonable on paper turns out to be wrong for the actual operating environment.

A Discovery Workshop puts the right people in the room to make those decisions early, with the engineering knowledge to make them properly.

What a Discovery Workshop actually is

A Discovery Workshop is a focused, engineering led working session between Ignys engineers and your team. The goal is to produce a clear, measurable, numbered Product Requirement Specification and to settle the high-level technology and architecture decisions the development project will be built around.

It is not a sales meeting. It is not a discovery call dressed up. It is structured engineering work, run by the engineers who would deliver your project, drawing on practical experience across hardware, firmware, compliance and manufacture.

In the session, Ignys engineers and your team, work through the product’s intended functions, target users, operating environment, performance requirements, regulatory landscape, volume targets, manufacturing approach and commercial constraints. Every requirement becomes a numbered, measurable line item. Subjective requirements like “pretty” or “light” get translated into something measurable or get flagged as decision items needing resolution. Trade-offs get surfaced. Decisions get recorded with the reasoning behind them.

What comes out is a Product Requirement Specification ready to flow into the next stages of our six-stage process.

What gets decided

The exact agenda depends on the product, but the substantive decisions typically include:

• Processor and platform direction. Microcontroller, MPU or SoC class. Vendor ecosystem implications. Long term availability. Toolchain and licensing considerations.
• Connectivity choice. BLE, WiFi, LoRaWAN, cellular (4G, NB IoT, LTE M), sub GHz, wired interfaces. Range, power, certification cost and recurring data cost weighed against the application.
• Power architecture. Battery vs mains, primary vs rechargeable, energy harvest, expected service life, charging strategy, low power state design.
• Sensing and interface choices. Sensor selection, accuracy and calibration requirements, user interface approach (touch, display, voice, app), legacy system interfaces.
• Compliance route. CE, UKCA, RED, LVD, FCC, sector specific standards. Pre compliance and certification cost and timeline implications.
• Cyber security architecture. Root of Trust, secure boot, signed update, credential management, supply chain. CRA implications where the product will be on the EU market.
• Manufacturing and test strategy. Target volume, assembly partner profile, test approach at volume, programming and calibration plan.
• Mechanical and enclosure interface. How the electronics fit physically, what the PCB shape and connector positions need to look like, sealing and environmental requirements.

What you take away

• A numbered, measurable Product Requirement Specification ready to drive the development programme within days of the workshop.
• Documented technology and architecture decisions with the reasoning recorded.
• An engineering risk register flagging the items that need resolution before, or early in, full development.
• An indicative scope, timeline and cost range for the development project, grounded in the decisions made during the workshop.
• A clear view of whether anything needs investigating through a Feasibility Study before development commits.

How a Discovery Workshop fits with the six-stage development process

Ignys delivers products through a defined six stage process running from Specification to Field Trial Prototype. A Discovery Workshop is the Specification stage delivered as a structured engagement. The output is the working document that the six-stages execute against., the time spent in the workshop is time the development project doesn’t lose to ambiguity later.

Engineers running the workshop. Not account managers.

When you sit down with Ignys for a Discovery Workshop, you are working directly with the engineers who would deliver your project. Not a pre-sales team. Not a project manager relaying inputs from someone else.

That matters because the right questions in a specification session are technical and architectural, not just commercial. Our engineers challenge assumptions constructively, identify risks you may not have anticipated, and give you an honest picture of what the project requires. We are not tied to specific component franchises or platforms, which means architecture decisions reflect what is right for your product, not what is convenient for us.

Ignys are three-time winners of the ELEKTRA Award for Electronics Design Team of the Year, with delivery experience across IoT, energy, consumer, alarms, security, industrial and measurement products. That pattern recognition is the part of a Discovery Workshop you can’t buy from a generic consultancy.

Confidence at every stage, for you and your stakeholders

For a product lead or R&D manager inside an established organisation, the pressure around starting a development project is rarely just technical. It is commercial and reputational. A project that runs over budget, misses the window or fails at field trial lands with the person who owned it.

A Discovery Workshop addresses both sides of that. Technically, the highest risk items get identified and the architecture is set on solid ground. Commercially, the development plan is grounded in decisions made by engineers who would deliver it, not in optimistic assumptions made by people who wouldn’t.

It also means you walk into the next leadership conversation with something concrete: a documented, engineered specification produced jointly with an independent design team that has the track record to back the recommendations up.

Who a Discovery Workshop is for

Discovery Workshops are built for product development and R&D teams inside established organisations with a real product to deliver and a serious commercial intent behind it.

Is this you?

• You have an approved product to develop, and you want the specification and key technology decisions made properly before the design programme begins.
• You’re about to commit significant development budget and need to remove the ambiguity from the brief before any of that resource is deployed.
• You have a product concept that is broadly clear, but specific architecture, connectivity, compliance or manufacturing decisions are still open.
• You’re inheriting a brief from elsewhere in the business and need it engineered into something that can be built.
• You’ve worked with a design partner before and the experience was that the development started before the specification was finished, with predictable consequences.

If your product has genuine technical uncertainty that needs proving before a specification can finalise (for example a sensing accuracy target you don’t yet know is achievable, or a battery life target that depends on a radio profile that has never been tested in your environment), the right place to start is a Feasibility Study rather than a Discovery Workshop. We’ll tell you straight on an initial call which one fits.

Getting started

A Discovery Workshop begins with a short initial call. We’ll ask enough to understand your product, your stage of development and where the open questions sit. From there we’ll propose a workshop scope, format and cost. Workshops can run as a single concentrated session for tightly scoped products, or as a short series of sessions where the product is more complex.