How to conduct collaborative feature kickoffs
By: Andrew Quan
Tags: User Experience, Productivity, Leadership, Product Management, Design

Part Two: Presentation — Set Context and Priorities (1 hr)

“Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life.” — Anthony Bourdain

Once you have formed the group of stakeholders, you’ll need to set up a workshop to set context and priorities. This is front-loading the work so that there’s less confusion and when deliverables don’t meet expectations.

The agenda should last 2 hours or so. It should bring your stakeholders through the journey of understanding why a feature is being built, who it is for, what value it delivers, and any prioritise or data to back up the decision.

The aim of setting context and priorities up-front are to:

Provide clarity

Increase buy-in

Find more (and better) solutions

Reduce delivery risk

My sample agenda that you can use has 6 parts, each with questions you should consider at each point:

6 Key Elements of a Context Setting Presentation to your feature team

🎯 Goals (5 to 10 mins)

Establish the goals of the collaborative workshop session, such as:

Understanding what problem is being solved. A problem statement mad-libs could assist here!

Understand how a solution to the problem relates to our overall company objectives, goals or product strategy

Provide an understanding of competitor landscape and alternative solutions

Huddle together to come up with solutions to solve the pain points identified

❓Problem and Audience (15 mins)

“A problem well stated is a problem half solved.” — John Dewey

Create a statement summarising what problem you are trying to solve:

What are the jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) that customers are finding the most painful?

What supporting evidence or data do we have to show how important this problem is?

Create a picture of the audience to allow the group to visualise and empathise with a persona:

Which customer segments are experiencing the problems mentioned?

How do we define the customer, audience, or customer segment in scope? A User Persona template would serve well here (Great post by Ben Ralph!)

What are the jobs-to-be-done per identified customer segments?

💸 Opportunity (10 minutes)

Here, you outline the overall opportunity for your business, especially in solving this problem. You may even want to use Michael Porter’s Five Forces and SWOT frameworks, given that the definition of Opportunity in this section is derived from there. A comprehensive guide to SWOT can be found here by Felicia C. Sullivan.

Use statistics and data that show the overall qualified opportunity to raise metrics that aligned with strategic goals. Opportunity measurements can be across various dimensions:

AARRR metrics (e.g., New customer acquisition, customer retention)

Revenue growth

Cost reduction

Any other quantifiable KPIs important to your business

📉 What we have today (10 minutes)

Present the current product suite, features and functionality as well as the technology stack used. You may also opt to ask engineers to present the technical limitations or constraints they have that cannot be overcome without major changes.

📈 What our competitors do (10 minutes)

Present some screenshots of compelling alternatives pointing how other companies solve the problems identified.

Highlight any areas where you think your company can target or improve upon immensely. Also, highlight any areas where your competitors excel over your own product.

🔭 In Scope / Out of Scope (5 minutes)

Present the areas that are in scope and out-of-scope for the collaborative design workshop. This should be fairly straight forward and will allow the group to hone in on a specific problem to be solved.

The outcome of Part Two

Your group has now got a solid understanding of the situation, context, complications and problem statement that you are solving for. Your group is now ready to hit the drawing board for the workshop phase.