Choose the right activity
Use the tabs to compare service desk triage, Product Owner triage and product discovery.
Service Desk Triage
Purpose: Quickly assess, classify and route incoming tickets as BAU or ideas.
- Reactive and fast decision-making.
- Checks urgency, severity and immediate ownership.
- Outputs are categorised tickets with clear next steps.
- Happens continuously, often daily or weekly.
Product Owner Triage
Purpose: Sort, assess and prioritise ideas before deciding what should move into discovery.
- Focuses on problem clarity, business value, user impact and roadmap alignment.
- Considers high-level effort, complexity, dependencies, timing and risk.
- Outputs are ideas prioritised and ready to be picked up for discovery.
- Usually aligns to platform owner meetings.
Product Discovery
Purpose: Validate the problem, explore opportunities, test assumptions and define solution direction.
- Investigative and evidence-driven.
- Includes research, problem framing, hypothesis mapping, prototyping and validation.
- Outputs are validated problem statements, evidence-based build/don't-build decisions and a refined backlog.
- Triggered when there is uncertainty around a problem, idea or opportunity.
Quick decision guide
Use this when a request lands and the next step is not obvious.
Incident?Use incident management.
BAU request?Keep in service desk process.
Idea but understood?PO triage and prioritise.
Problem unclear?Run discovery before delivery.