Discovery, design, build, launch — every studio says this. Here is what each phase actually looks like at Devsoleil, including the parts that do not fit neatly into a diagram.
Every agency has a process diagram with four or five stages and arrows connecting them. Discovery → Design → Development → Launch. It looks clean. It is not inaccurate. But it hides most of what actually happens.
We want to be honest about how we work, because the hidden parts are where clients have the most anxiety and where we have learned the most hard lessons.
Every project starts with a discovery call, usually 90 minutes, where we try to understand not just what you want but why you want it and what you are afraid of. The second question is often more useful than the first.
After that call we write a brief back to you — our interpretation of what you said. This step is not a formality. We have caught fundamental misunderstandings at this stage that would have cost weeks to fix later. Clients who read the brief carefully and push back on things we got wrong are the ones whose projects go smoothest.
Discovery also includes competitive research, technical assessment of any existing systems, and a rough project risk map. We flag risks early because they do not go away by themselves.
We design in Figma and share a staging link from the first week. Every screen is designed at mobile and desktop size. You will see the typography, spacing, colours, and component behaviour before we write a line of code.
The thing clients sometimes do not expect: we will push back on requests that we think will hurt the product. Not because we know better — you know your business better than we do — but because our job is to say "here is what we think will happen to your conversion rate if we move the form above the hero" rather than just saying yes. You make the final call. But we will tell you what we see.
We deploy to a staging URL at the end of week one. From that point, you can see the product at every stage of construction. Most clients visit daily. That is fine — we update it as we go and flag when something is a placeholder that will be replaced.
We do not do "big reveal" projects where we disappear for eight weeks and show you a finished product. The feedback loop is continuous. This means the final handover has almost no surprises, because you have been watching it get built.
Launch week is not the end of the project — it is the highest-risk period. Traffic hits live infrastructure for the first time. Real users interact with flows that were only tested by a small group. Edge cases appear that no one imagined.
We stay available for the full week after launch. Bugs get fixed same day. We monitor performance. We check analytics to see if real user behaviour matches what we designed for.
After that week, we send a post-launch report: what worked, what we would revisit in the next iteration, what the data is showing. Most studios do not do this. We think it is the most useful document we produce.
Every project has a moment — usually somewhere in the build phase — where something turns out to be harder than expected. A third-party integration behaves differently than documented. A client-side constraint changes the data model. A design decision that looked clean in Figma creates an interaction problem in the browser.
How a studio handles these moments tells you more about them than any case study. We surface them immediately, explain the options clearly, and give our recommendation. We do not hide problems until they become crises.
That is the only part of the process that matters more than the diagram.
Drop us a message or call us directly. We reply to every enquiry — usually the same day.