Don’t forget to Kickoff your project, epic or feature.
In the midst of the hustle and bustle of quarter end and roadmaps being due its hard to remember all the great “plays” that you once used to make sure work gets done well and today I was reminded of just that. Now it seems so simple to those on the outside looking in, to stop and take a breadth and DO THE KICK OFF CALL, but it often gets over looked because you are running towards the next great milestone, the next great release, and the next high high or disproven hypothesis that you and your team are chasing.
Kick off calls are great for centering your team, for realigning everyone on what the actual goal is, and what it is not. What is in scope and what is not. What the feature is going to be and what it is not. As a product manager I really love the kick off call to center my executional team on our next epic of work. It’s a working session where we can decide on what the work is going to be. Now today in particular we had an ambitious roadmap and an ill defined epic so the goal was to get product, design and engineering all on the same page of what was in/out of scope and possible in the time we had to accomplish it all. And I tell ya, we all left that meeting feeling great, not all of our questions were answered but many were, and being about to dig in with your tactical leadership is always really fun in my book.
As the PM I don’t walk into the kick off calls empty handed, I initially spend time with each teammate to understand their perspective, what they have learned, also what our business strategy is, what our user problem is and more. Ultimately I am coming to that meeting with a presentation/document that includes: definition, roles & responsibilities, user stories, what is out of scope, open questions, and anything else that I know of. I use this as a framework for discussion, knowing that things will change but using it to guide my team of tactical leaders to victory!
We didn’t get through everything today in our kick off call, but needless to say it was a great reminder that it is really important to take a step back and really look at the forest through the trees sometimes. Make sure you all agree on the approach and what you are making together and above all build great things.