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How to conduct collaborative feature kickoffs
One does not simply design without team alignment and clarity.
When designing new products, many organisations rely on requirements gathering exercises that often place the onus on a product designer/business analyst/product owner to specify a checklist of features that the technical team needs to build against.
A common method is to write up detailed specifications, hand it over to engineers to get them built, then repeat. This linear and siloed process is also known as a “build trap”, a term popularised by Melissa Perri.
Lobbing detailed specifications over to engineers from afar rarely works well for a few main reasons:
- Designs made in isolation are often inefficient and incorrect— time may be wasted researching ways to solve a problem. Assumptions made through designs could have easily be validated with team collaboration.
- Design assumptions may not be technically feasible — your current technology stack may not support your ideal design. Upfront design tradeoffs need to be discussed ongoing in collaboration with different teams.
- A constantly changing competitive landscape impacts customer needs — when your competitors launch new features, how your customers expect features to look, feel and work also change. This means your designs need to be flexible enough to adapt if needed.
- Technical teams expect their solutions to be correctly solving needs — if features are quickly released and are not adopted because they incorrectly meet customer needs, engineers can be quickly demotivated. Trust in product and design diminishes impeding future progress.
In short, if there isn’t a culture for a consistent feature development lifecycle, solutions could be built against specifications that make the wrong many assumptions and that meet only a handful of the stakeholders it intends to.
So how do we enable more collaborative design? One method is through a collaborative feature design kickoff, that inspires each individual, aligns goals across teams, and forms a realistic action plan to follow.
Provided below is a template for a feature collaboration workshop I recently conducted…
