What is Feature Kick-off Meeting?
A feature kickoff meeting is a conference held between the stakeholders to discuss aspects related to a new feature development, such as goals, scope, development time, budget, responsibilities, etc. Product managers and stakeholders meet with designers and developers to align their vision of what needs to be done and how to achieve success. It is not necessary to hold a separate meeting to discuss every feature within a sprint, yet this conference is very useful before engaging with big features that might be game-changing for the company.
Kick-off Meeting Benefits
- Keeps the team aligned – kickoff meetings help the team understand what key benefits of the new feature are and why, and plan their work towards achieving the agreed goal.
- Increases productivity – when the team shares their understanding of what needs to be done to implement the feature, it eliminates unnecessary hurdles and delays related to repetitive communication and generating new ideas along the way.
- Formalizes processes for productive collaboration – apart from the feature development process, other aspects of the feature release, such as marketing or sales benefit from more formal processes that ensure cohesiveness and smooth collaboration across departments.
Kick-off Meeting Steps
A kick-off meeting is the most productive if it follows a sequence of well-defined steps that encompass every stage of its preparation, discussion, and committing to a certain development path:
Step 1. Develop the feature concept.
A Product Manager collects customer feedback about the product, conducts the market research and gathers other data to create or update a customer journey map and a product roadmap.
Step 2. Identify and invite stakeholders
Stakeholders are those who will design, implement, and test the new feature, so they typically include a PO/PM, engineers, UX designers, sales and marketing representatives, customer service operators, and executives.
Step 3. Present the feature
After the stakeholders are identified, you can proceed with the kick-off meeting. At first you need to give an overview of the new feature in a broader context. Describe, for example, the problem or the opportunity for growth it addresses and the value it will bring to the organization
Step 4. Collect feedback
Before going into technical details, collect initial feedback from the stakeholders. It is a good chance to check if you have a shared understanding of the feature’s value and what possible hopes and concerns are.
Step 5. Brainstorm
The whole team thinks of different alternatives to a solution by going through the whole user journey. This is the time to discuss all possible ways the feature might fail, from technical imperfections and flawed usability to legal constraints and severe competition. Capture all concerns together with the selected solutions and answers.
Step 6. Discuss technical details
The final part of a kick-off meeting is an optional technical discussion. During this session, technically savvy members of the team discuss technical limitations, resources and skills required, and implementation options for the winning design.
Such detailed feature kick-off helps reach a deeper understanding of all opportunities and limitations associated with the new feature, agree upon a certain solution and draft final feature requirements so that the developers and the product team had shared expectations from the feature implementation.
