The 5Ds in project management is a phase breakdown of large milestones that every project team needs to complete. This model gives a full vision of the tasks and deliverables for each phase.

This process is thought with Agile / Scrum Project/product methodologies in mind.

We call these phases the 5Ds:

Discovery: validates the business reason to kick-off the project, the benefits can be to revenue growth, cost reduction or risk management. Depending of the benefits these can also be short, medium term or strategic.

• Define business value
• Target market
• Competitive analysis
• Deliverable: Business Case

Definition: once the management team validates the importance of the project, a clear functional definition is required in order to specify the right set of user, features and business requirements.

• Define personas
• User stories
• Technical dependencies
• Information Architecture
• Core functionality
• Deliverable: User Stories and Product Technical Requirements Document 

Design: gives not only the look and feel to the solution but also aligns user and business requirements with the user experience. Why this is important?, imagine a disruptive user experience, this will affect the engagement and traffic to the Live solution and this at the end will put off advertisers, can you see the picture?.

• Paper prototypes / sketches
• Wireframes
• Usability evaluation
• Visual design explorations
• Visual design approval
• Deliverable: User Interface (UI) Designs

Development: the development, QA and product/user team start working every day, moving stories from backlog to the sprint and working together from technical analysis, development, quality assurance and user validation, this is an iterative process and is the core of the Agile methodology.

• Architecture design
• Daily scrum
• Code iteration cycles
• Usability evaluation
• Release management
• Unit testing
• Code refactoring
• Deliverable: Working solution and source code

Deliver: when the final user validates the solution, technical team performs performance testing and release plan, the full working solution is ready to be deployed to Live.

• Case testings
• Test reports
• Build releases
• Deliverable: Shippable release 

Remember that the project doesn’t finish when is released, the market will give important product feedback and is the job of the Agile product team to constantly improve the product by always aligning user experience and business objectives.