Define the Scope

Setting clear project boundaries transforms your Discovery insights into actionable decisions. This process ensures your team builds the right things for your users while staying within realistic constraints of time, budget, and resources. From there, you’ll create user stories, feature priorities, and project boundaries that keep everyone focused on what users actually need. Once you’ve established your scope, the next step is to organize how your defined features and content should be structured.

Align with Discovery Artifacts

Before defining what to build, it’s essential to ground your scope decisions in the user research and insights you’ve already gathered. This step is about connecting your Discovery phase outputs like personas, journey maps, and user research findings directly to scope decisions.

By starting with these artifacts, you can ensure that every feature and boundary you define serves real user needs rather than organizational assumptions.

Review your established user personas to identify which user types your scope should prioritize. Use persona goals and frustrations to guide feature inclusion decisions. Determine if your scope can realistically serve all personas or if you need to focus on primary users first. Validate that your planned features align with the behaviors and needs documented in your personas.

More Information about Personas and Archetypes

Examine existing journey maps to identify the most critical pain points and opportunities within your scope. Use journey stages to determine which user touchpoints must be included in this project phase. Identify gaps in current user flows that your scope should address. Map your planned features to specific journey moments to ensure comprehensive coverage of user needs.

More information about Journey Maps

Translate user research findings into specific scope requirements and feature decisions. Use documented user quotes and feedback to validate which problems are most urgent to solve. Identify recurring themes from research that should influence your scope boundaries. Ensure your scope addresses the highest-impact user needs identified during Discovery.

Create User Stories and Feature Requirements

Start organizing what functionality your project will include by translating user needs into specific, actionable user stories. Look for patterns in user tasks and group features by priority level. This helps transform abstract user needs into concrete development requirements that your team can build and test.

These user stories become your project roadmap and help teams understand not just what to build, but why it matters to users. Before moving to development planning, use this step to ensure every feature has a clear user justification and success criteria.

Create clear acceptance criteria for each user story that defines when the feature successfully meets user needs.

When creating user stories and requirements, consider the following areas:

Define user stories for the essential tasks users must be able to complete within your scope. Create detailed acceptance criteria that specify how users will interact with key features. Document the complete workflow from user goal to successful completion. Establish priority levels for different user tasks based on frequency and importance.

Document specific feature requirements including inputs, outputs, and user interactions. Define how features should behave in different scenarios and edge cases. Specify accessibility requirements and responsive design considerations for each feature. Create clear boundaries around what each feature will and won’t do within your scope.

Define what content and information your scope must include to support user tasks. Specify content types, formats, and organization requirements for your features. Document any content creation, migration, or management needs within your scope. Establish content quality standards and approval processes for your project.

Establish Project Boundaries and Constraints

Clearly document what you will NOT include in this project phase to prevent scope creep and maintain focus. Look for features or user needs that, while potentially valuable, don’t fit within your current timeline, budget, or technical constraints.

These boundaries protect your ability to deliver high-quality solutions for your prioritized features. Before finalizing exclusions, use this step to create a “future roadmap” that acknowledges valuable ideas outside current scope while maintaining project focus.

Document the rationale behind each boundary decision so you can reference these when stakeholders suggest additions during development.

Ask Yourself

This phase is about making strategic decisions that balance user needs with practical constraints. You’ll want to think deeply about:

  • Which user stories are absolutely critical versus nice-to-have?
  • What’s the minimum viable scope that solves users’ core problems?
  • How do my Discovery artifacts inform feature prioritization?
  • What constraints require tough decisions about scope boundaries?

Use your personas and journey maps to validate that scope decisions focus on the most impactful user needs. This ensures you’re building something valuable rather than just something that seems convenient for your organization.

Moving to Structure and Organization

Well-defined scope creates a foundation for organizing how your features and content should work together to serve users. Your user stories and feature requirements become the building blocks for information architecture decisions.

With scope established, you can move confidently into structuring your content and features in ways that match how users think and behave, rather than how your organization is internally arranged.

Establish Structure & Findability
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