3 Steps to a Successful Kickoff Meeting
Written by: Robert Paul & Mika Xiang Gu — January 28th 2018
It was two weeks in the making… We finally had our kickoff meeting with our partners at PNC for our MHCI capstone project. It was a slow building week of nerves, excitement, and relief.
Step 1: Planning and preparing
Since the background of our different team members has been in-house design and development work, we hadn’t had previous experience running a client kickoff meeting. Knowing what balance to achieve was difficult for us to know going in. How much time should we spend showing the research we’ve conducted? How time should be spent solely asking questions about the project? Should the entire kickoff be a variety of design activities that get at these questions instead?
Some of our questions for PNC were:
- From your personal perspective, how do you understand this project?
- What are the expected deliverables? Is this something you see being implemented in the next 3–5 months, or 3–5 years?
- What were the events and thinking that went into this challenge being picked?
- What is your team’s product development process?
- What is the org structure at PNC?
- Who do you think are your main competitors?
- Who are your most important clients and why?
- What is the on-boarding process for new clients?
- What product solution attempts have worked? What hasn’t?
- What are the constraints we should consider?
- What is the scope of this project? What is too wide or too narrow?
We created a PNC product map that shows the system of different apps that the company offers on the iOS and Google app store. As well, we developed a competitive analysis to understand which different features are common or unique in the treasury management product landscape.
We took these artifacts into our kickoff meeting to probe a response from PNC as to how they view the different apps that are part of the product map and the other companies that are also competing against them.
As well, we levied extra time to hashing out the scope of the project. Are we looking at creating an end-to-end high fidelity prototype or more of a conceptual design that leverages months of deep research?
Step 2: Dress up for the meeting
Step 3: Debrief the meeting
We got together as a team and walked through our notes and built a consensus around what we learned from the kickoff. We’ve already identified three types of problems we could solve in this project, based on the priorities of our clients.
- Acquiring more downstream clients
- Improving product integration and workflow
- Making a product experience that adapts as a company grows in scale and their treasury management needs.
For now, we’re back to drafting a research plan for next two months, and a specific research plan for March.
Till next week,
Team PNC at CMU
