Behind the Scenes: How Sadiq from Niphtio Aligned His Team with Effective Kickoff Meetings
Behind the Scenes: How Sadiq from Niphtio Aligned His Team with Effective Kickoff Meetings
With Sadiq Saleh, PhD and Senior Product Manager at Niphtio
Hey everyone, it's Francis here. Back from a little hiatus away from writing.
In today's article, I have the pleasure of chatting with Sadiq, the Senior Product Manager at Niphtio, about kickoff meetings.
If you haven't heard of Niphtio before, they're an early-stage, self-funded startup founded by one of the brilliant minds behind Google Reader. Their platform brings a fresh and enjoyable twist to bookmarking, allowing users to save, search, and organize their bookmarks in a new way. Pretty cool, right?
Now, let's dive into the topic at hand: kickoff meetings. If you're not familiar with them, Sadiq is here to share his insights on how he utilizes these meetings to align his team on new initiatives.
Alright, folks, let's dive straight into it!
Hi there!
Today, I want to talk about an important part of product management - making sure your entire team is on the same page when starting new projects. One of my favourite ways to do this is through kickoff meetings. At the startup where I work, Niphtio, we use these meetings to align our team of eight.
Right now, my main focus is creating a product roadmap for the short to medium term. It's important that everyone on the team understands the value we want to bring to our customers for each project we start.
Let’s see how kickoff meetings can help bring everyone together and make sure we're all working towards the same goal.
Kickoff Meetings
When creating a product, it's rare for work to flow in a straight line from the product manager to the designer to the developer. In reality, everyone plays a crucial role in each step of the process. That's where kickoff meetings come in.
They serve two main purposes:
Conveying vision: By involving the whole team, the team can better understand what they're building while also gaining more empathy for the customers.
Structuring thoughts: Kickoff meetings help the person(s) the vision to organize the ideas and put them down on paper in a clear way so that they are ready to be shared with the team.
To start a project, we usually begin by writing a Product Requirement Document. Once it's complete and the project is prioritized, the next step is a kickoff meeting. The goal is to share the research we've done on the feature with the management team and key team members (like the tech lead and the designer) before everyone starts working together.
Structure of the meeting
During the kickoff meeting, I, as the Product Manager, will guide the team through the Product Requirements Document (PRD). This document serves as the meeting's agenda and has already been shared with the team beforehand, so they are expected to have read it.
The document is meant to be brief and provide a rough idea of what the feature will entail. The feature is a working document that is not yet ready for development, and the goal of the kickoff meeting is to gather feedback and iterate on the PRD. The conversations during the meeting will help shape the document.
The structure of the PRD has gone through several iterations, as I found it was necessary to adapt it to the needs of the team I'm working with.
At Niphtio, we use Google Workspace and a Google Doc template. One piece of advice I would give is to make the template your own by adding your company's "Why, What, and How." Each company is unique in how much they need each of the Why, What and How sections to be elaborated.
For example, at Niphtio, we mostly need the "Why" and the different phases, but we plan to add complexity as we grow.
Here’s the structure of the Product Requirement Document (PRD) we use.
The Why
It starts with the Why of the feature, which is the context of the feature. I believe that Product Managers should spend most of their time in this section.
Questions and Risks
The next section follows with some questions or risks found during your research. For example, if we don’t deliver this before the end of the quarter, it’s not worth building it.
Go-To-Market (GTM)
Then comes the section listing all the phases of this feature. A phase is our way of slicing a feature into multiple chunks of value. In addition to explaining the phase, I also add the requirements for it.
I usually describe the first phase in detail while painting the following phases with broader strokes. A phase is usually 4-6 weeks max for Niphtio.
The way I list the requirement is to make a list of user needs, under which I will list things that need to be built to fulfill each need.
Gates
Then comes the Gates, which describes what is needed to be successful for this phase. This replaces dates, so you stop working or iterating when you’ve hit your goal, not a specific date. It’s a signal to move to the next phase.
For example, we’re delivering a new feature that will increase retention by at least 10%, and the subsequent phase is about increasing the acquisition by 10%.
What is the difference between a Product Review and a Kickoff?
At Niphtio, we use Kickoff Meetings at the beginning of the process when the PRD is around 50% complete. These meetings are mainly for the stakeholders and key team members like the lead designer and Product Marketers. The goal is to get initial validation that the feature is worth investing time and energy into.
In contrast, we use Product Reviews when the PRD is about 90% complete. During these meetings, we inform the entire team about what we're working on. We typically have preliminary designs and a tech plan, and we may invite stakeholders from other teams if necessary.
Key challenges when implementing kickoff
The most significant challenge we face when implementing the kickoff meetings is making sure that everyone understands that the intention of the meeting is to get feedback.
Sometimes people see a ‘formal’ document and an official meeting to review it, and they assume that it is set in stone. I have seen sometimes when a PRD is shared, you get no feedback, and then during development, you get a lot of questions that should have been addressed before starting development.
Another challenge is making sure that everyone participates and is engaged during the meeting. This is especially challenging for remote teams. At Niphtio, we’ve put a few rules in place to help, such as requiring all participants to have their video on during the meeting.
We also encourage people to ask questions by triggering conversation and repeating that there is always room for feedback. Lastly, we give up to 24 hours after the meeting for participants to share their comments on Slack if they prefer.
Benefits of implementing kickoff
For one, it helps us to have some standardization in the process, which can be especially helpful for first-timers who are just getting started with the company.
It also helps us avoid forgetting key details by bringing more eyes to the problem. We also find that it helps us communicate the upcoming strategy and how our features tie into the company’s larger goals. This helps prevent us from turning into a feature mill and, in doing so, prevents demotivating the team.
Finally, the kickoff meetings help our remote teams feel included in the process and build empathy for the customer.
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Voilà. That’s all for today!
Thanks, Sadiq, for sharing your wisdom with us!
Kickoff meetings are an amazingly powerful tool that can help convey vision, structure thoughts, standardize the process, and ensure everyone on the team is working towards the same goal.
I love the simplicity of using the Product Requirement Document (PRD) as the agenda. It is a great way to force it to be short when you know it’ll have to be covered in a single meeting.
See you next week!