Remove Discovery duty role

Discussions - Public
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Ticket to log time: BB-9927

With the introduction of the new BizDev Support Engineer, there doesn’t seem to be much use of the discovery duty role. As the BizDev support engineer is part of the discussion from the start, it would reduce any context switching if the same person were to do the initial high-level discovery (upto 5 hours). Any deeper technical discovery we were anyway scheduling for in the upcoming sprint. The only change would be that the deeper technical discovery would be assigned to someone on the team who has the capacity to take on a new epic.

@team What are your thoughts on this? Does anyone see any benefits to keeping the discovery duty role in addition to the bizdev support engineer?

PR to remove the discovery duty role is here if anyone would like to review.

Note: Last date to review the PR and this post will be 22 August 2025.

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I think this thread can be public. It doesn’t directly affect me much so I’ll let others comment, but your points make sense to me.

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The DD role has a secondary function, which is making it clear who is available to take on a new project. I’d sooner rescope the DD role rather than remove it-- if we’re no longer requiring someone to allocate that time on a rotation, we still need to know who would be the point person to assign these discoveries to, and an easy way to determine that.

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@Fox That information is already being tracked and updated here as part of epic planning and sustainability management.

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Ahhh-- in that case, I suppose we can remove it. When we do so, we’ll need to update:

  1. The handbook to remove the role
  2. The sales documentation in the handbook to specify where the list of available team members is
  3. The main onboarding course which probably mentions it in a few places
  4. The bizdev course which I’m certain mentions it-- in fact it probably needs a refresh anyway, since some things have changed after Jordan took over.
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Currently, when I need to check who to send discovery work to, I look at this spreadsheet and check whose name is in the “Bebop DD” column for the sprint (there might be an easier way to do this, but I’m not sure what it is!)

@pooja If the BizDev Support Engineer takes over the discovery duties, which would be the easiest way to find out who they are so I know who to send discovery work to?

EDIT:
Apologies if this is covered in the PR; I only noticed the link after posting, and haven’t had the chance to review it.

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Thank you for pointing this out-- I’m not sure how I missed it in the initial post and I’m going to review it now!

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@Ali If it’s a high level discovery then the BizDev Support Engineer is expected to take it (provided they have the capacity). Otherwise the role statistics spreadsheet (which is being kept up-to-date by epic planning managers) tracks who has the capacity to take on new epics, so you could send it to them.

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@pooja Thank you. That process is nice and easy. :slightly_smiling_face:

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