Discovery — the phase where requirements get properly understood before any code is written — is the part of a project most likely to get compressed or skipped entirely under time pressure, and it’s almost always a mistake.
Without proper discovery, a development team builds against assumptions rather than confirmed requirements. Gaps surface mid-build, when they’re far more expensive to fix — a missing approval step, an integration nobody scoped, a workflow that doesn’t match how the team actually operates day to day.
A short but real discovery phase — reviewing the actual workflow, talking to the people who’ll use the system daily, and confirming what “done” looks like — costs a small fraction of the project’s total budget and prevents most of the expensive rework that shows up later.
If a vendor offers to skip straight from a sales call to a quote with no discovery step in between, that’s worth asking about directly — it’s usually where scope gaps come from.