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Discovery & Framing Kick Off

discovery&framing

What Is It?

Discovery & framing kick off meeting is an opportunity to meet with key stakeholders on a project and introduce them to Rise8 practices while aligning (or realigning) on product goals, anti-goals, MVP scope, risks, stakeholder mapping through a set of facilitated activities.

Why Do It?

This meeting serves as an official kick off for the project as some time may have passed in between stakeholders and your team aligning on scope and getting the project started.

This may also be the first time your stakeholders are meeting your team, learning about your practices so it's an opportunity to get them excited about working with you!

When To Do It?

Kick off should occur at the beginning of the project either before or early on in the discovery & framing phase of a project.

Who’s Involved?

Product Managers, Product Designers, and Engineers, stakeholders, clients, and end-users.

Tools You Might Need

  • White boarding tool like Figjam, Miro, Lucid spark etc…
  • Video Conferencing tool like Google Meets, Zoom, MS TEAMS, etc.

How To Do It (Steps)

  1. [Prerequisite] Review Relevant Documentation
    In order to prepare for the project kick off, review various documentation that you or the team may have prior to setting up the meeting. These could vary from project to project but may include things like:

    • Scoping artifacts
    • Proposal documents
    • Contracts
    • Initial notes

    You may also want to set up a quick call with some of your primary stakeholders who can help ensure you are inviting the right individuals to the kickoff meeting.

  2. Prep Agenda & Activities
    Based on your desk research and information gathered you can now begin to think about the agenda and activities you want to include in your kick off meeting. In general, it’s a good idea to not redo activities you’ve done in the past with the same group of individuals so make sure you reference various artifacts and documentation you’ve collected in step 1 to help inform your agenda.

    While every project is different you may consider some of the following activities to include (a detailed description of how to facilitate these activities may be found on the plays page of this playbook).

    For Remote sessions- it’s usually a good idea to limit kick-offs to 2 hours so tailor your activities based on the time you have available.

    • Icebreaker / Introductions (Facilitated Activity)
    • Introduction to Rise 8 & How We Work (Content)
    • Discovery & Framing Overview (Content)
    • Stakeholder Mapping (Facilitated Activity)
    • Goals & Anti-Goals (Facilitated Activity)
    • Risks & Mitigations (Facilitated Activity)
    • Process Mapping (Facilitated Activity)
    • Persona Generation (Facilitated Activity)
    • Next Steps & Engagement Expectations (Content) Kickoff Activities

  3. Assign Team Roles
    Before the meeting ensure you have roles assigned to the members of your team.

    Facilitator:

    • Guides participants through activities and keeps things moving along. 

    • Ask follow up questions to participants to clarify anything they mention. 

    • Main person who will be talking with/interacting with participants.

    Co-Facilitator:

    • Keeps track of time.
    • Creates and monitors slack thread for back-channel questions from observers and makes sure to ask poignant ones during the session.

    Note Taker:

    • Take notes during the session to cover any conversational points that are not already captured in activities.

  4. Conduct Kick Off Meeting!
    The last step is to facilitate the meeting! Before conducting the meeting ensure that guests and participants have access to various tools you may be using (video conferencing, digital whiteboard etc..).