Your 3-Day Head Start on Building the Right Thing

Once upon a time, we had ‘Discovery’, ‘Define’, and ‘Design’. These phases let us explore the problem and the audience, while conceiving a holistic solution. Now we have sprints, complete with a backlog that seems like it appears overnight and a development team that is going to build with or without design to guide it. How do we continue to create great products?

Introducing the Kickoff Sprint. This 3-day workshop enables you to engage your clients and stakeholders to quickly define the key elements of your product or project, aligns the team, and identifies critical risks. When it is complete, everyone has a good idea of what is going to be built as well as what it will take to get there. It has been tested with companies of all sizes, from founders looking to conceptualize their first product, to large companies redesigning existing products, as well as across verticals. Its general enough to be used in a wide variety of circumstances while specific enough to ensure that you get specific, usable results.

The Kickoff Sprint consists of 5 exercises, each one designed to pivot the team’s perspective on the product, while drilling down to greater levels of detail. Each stage of the Kickoff Sprint balances democratic content generation with collaborative consensus. You may be familiar with some of the individual exercises, but the magic is in how each is conducted and in how they fit together. The workshop starts with establishing clear goals & priorities, then moves to defining possible users of the product. Next, we shift to a task perspective, mapping the activities those user will need to accomplish to meet the goals, before visualizing key areas of the solution. When these four areas are clear, everyone involved will have a shared understanding of the vision. The final step is to identify key risks and develop a plan to mitigate them.

This workshop will introduce leaders of any kind, from product owners and scrum masters, to UX and development leads, to each of the exercises, show how they fit together, give you some tips on how to facilitate them with your team, and enable you to experience the whole process via a demo project. With this experience, you will be prepared to run a Kickoff Sprint with your own team.

I can train your team on how to run a Kickoff sprint, or I could lead your team through it. Let’s talk to figure out which would be a better option.