Working Sessions + Sketches
Weekly musings about life as a PM
Collaborative working sessions are powerful in empowering teams to come up with effective solutions. We’ve been recently trying out weekly working sessions with one of our teams (PM, engineers, designer, and QA) to see if it would help us come up with better and more well-thought-out features. The process we’ve been using has been inspired by Shape Up.
1. Documentation of As-Is flow — In this step, we’re trying to better understand how a process works. We’re documenting the current steps in a process, why certain steps are being done and potential pain points encountered. We might need to circle back with our end users a few times to clarify any open questions.
2. Identifying the PTBS — Now, that we understand the current state, we’re now identifying the PTBS. This also involves accounting for any business objectives and appetite for the amount of product work to be invested.
3. High-level To-Be flow — Prior to going to the team, we normally take a stab at coming up with 1 or 2 high-level proposed solutions. After this, we then start looping in the rest of the team. In our working sessions, we share the current state and the problem(s) to be solved. At this point, we might also evaluate other potential high-level proposed solutions and deciding as a team which one we want to proceed with.
4. Fat Marker Sketches— We start sketching out what the to-be flow could look like. This helps to identify any potential rabbit holes and think through our solution in more detail. We also try to keep in mind the appetite for the amount of product work.
Effective collaborative working sessions take time and trial and error. You can try starting small and expanding new things as the team goes through the process.
