Episode 45: On Subscription Discovery Sessions with Rebar Technology’s Christy Beesley and Nick Streams

Are you hoping to start a subscription service, or are you interested in learning more about the process? 

This week’s episode of Subscriptions: Scaled is a little different than usual. This week we sit down with Christy Beesley and Nick Streams of Rebar Technology, who produce this podcast.

Together the pair provide us with their expertise on subscriptions, particularly the importance of discovery sessions. Keep reading to learn all about the subscriptions industry and the best practice for starting a new project.

Rebar Technology

Rebar Technology provides a wide range of development, integration, and operational services to help brands and entrepreneurs deliver a tailored customer and business billing subscription experience. It also helps brands improve efficiencies and reduce operating costs in their subscription services.

Christy Beesley

Christy is VP of Merchant Engagement and Solutions at Rebar Technology and has been with the company for five or six years. She explains that the team works with clients to help them get where they need to be in their subscription service.

The team helps with customer development, software integrations, systems interface, and other client need.

Nick Streams

Nick is VP of Solutions Engineering at Rebar Technology.  His role is primarily on the delivery and development side of the company. The team works with all types of customer development projects and some in-house product development under Nick’s review.

What Is a Discovery Session?

Nick shares exactly what a discovery session is. He explains that a discovery session is an initial collaborative process with all the stakeholders of a project. 

A discovery session is a foundational meeting where you bring everyone together to lay out and agree upon the project's goals and talk through the problems that need solving. It’s essential to bring together people from different departments, even within the same company.

In a discovery session, the participants discuss what the project is and why they’re starting it, among other key questions. The point of the session is to allow everyone to speak their mind and get their ideas out there. In the session, you can plan timelines and budgets, too.

Sometimes within software development projects, a discovery session is the only time where all the stakeholders are brought together. It’s essential to understand who all the stakeholders are and what their expectations are.

Throughout the process of the discovery session, groups are brought together to agree upon what the project needs.

Christy also thinks it’s essential for brands to identify what their scope is. In a discovery session, they can nail it down. Team members should agree on what the brand will do, what they’re not going to do, and why certain factors are essential in a project.

It’s important to get an agreement between all the stakeholders, teams, and departments that will be participating in the subscription project. Everyone must have a clear understanding of what their role will be in the project and how much time will need to be put into it.

Going through the discovery outlines key concepts of what everyone needs to do in the project. It sets the stage for the project management process.

Why Is a Discovery Session Important?

Christy goes on to explain why a discovery session is so important for any company wanting to start a subscription service. Christy explains that a lot of the time, teams think they know what they want, but their solution is entirely different from what they thought it was going to be.

If you skip the discovery phase, companies are likely to do a lot of backtracking. They may have to fix some of the things they made assumptions about or overlooked.

Nick adds that many people have been involved in software projects and get midway through them to discover that they’re out of budget or something’s gone wrong. A lot of the time, these problems date back to a skipped or underdeveloped discovery session. Perhaps the discovery session wasn’t clear enough for everyone involved, or steps were skipped.

How Do You Conduct a Discovery Session?

The pair then go over how a company conducts a discovery session. 

Christy explains that at Rebar Technology, they go through a pre-evaluation phase to conduct a discovery session. When a brand comes to them asking for help with a project, their team looks at how far along they are with their service and whether they’ve made a clear assessment of their objectives.

The team at Rebar Technology also looks at gaps a brand may not have considered and gets a general idea of how prepared they are. After the evaluation, Rebar Technology comes up with an approach.

In this approach, the team at Rebar outlines who they need to speak to about the project and what problems the company is having with it. Generally, they try to develop a clear understanding of the project.

This evaluation also gives the team an idea of how involved everyone must be in the project. One department of a company may be heavily involved, while another may be less so. From there, they go into really defining a brand’s scope on their project.

Rebar Technology makes sure that when defining scope, it looks at any assumptions or dependencies, such as any problems with system integrations.

Advice on Starting a Subscription Service

Christy and Nick also provide advice for entrepreneurs and companies who want to dive into starting a subscription project.

Their main advice is to have a discovery session, even if you’re eager to get started quickly with a project and be hands-on quickly. Otherwise, skipping the discovery session can come back to bite you.

Christy explains that whatever budget or plan you think you have, you’re not going to have a clear understanding across the board of what needs to be accomplished without a discovery session.

Nick adds that whatever you put into your discovery process is what you’ll get out of it. In many cases, people want to shorten it because they’re too busy and claim they don’t have time for it. But when this happens, typically the projects end up overlooking essential factors and having more challenges down the line.

It’s important to work everything out for a subscriptions project in the beginning, to save all sorts of headaches along the way.

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Head to rebartechnology.com or email info@rebartechnology.com to schedule a call today.