During 2018 I’ve started learning the importance of strategies when kicking off a new project in the digital world, given that ‘these practices can define the future of a product and specify the correct paths that it needs to take to accomplish its goals’.

It sounds easy, “to accomplish goals”, but what happens when you find yourself working without a goal? Or even worse, what happens when a whole team doesn’t have a clear goal to hold on to? Ok, I feel like I have some experience with this. Are you able to work without goals? Yes, you can, but that means that no one on the team knows what the right path is, understands the reasons why the client is sending certain tasks, or even why are we doing what we’re doing. This leads to the feared term frustration, and from a management or leadership perspective working with a frustrated team is the last thing you want to do.

I want to tell you briefly about this experience. At Indicius we’ve been working on Metacenter, a product from Data Advantage Group. Metacenter is a database meta management system that came to us with a need for updating its interface and markup. The goal seemed really clear, but there were many technical limitations because it was an app built nearly 10 years ago with a lot of security policies, which made it really hard to put this project into action. It took many months until we were able to set up the path that we should have taken from the beginning and from there, we started feeling that things were moving along nicely.

Getting close to the new year, I came up with a plan for setting up a retrospective to learn from our mistakes and gradually start defining long and short term goals for 2019. And again, it sounds easy to say “define goals”, but I was forgetting that the team was 100% remote, that I had never devised any kind of process like this, and that there were commercial goals that we weren’t even close to knowing. But nevertheless, I decided to move on, because I knew that all the final input could be very valuable for the company.

Below you’ll see how the workshop we did at Indicius’ HQ was set-up, how we explored the biggest issues we had during 2018 to subsequently think of solutions. We also analyzed the PO and UX leader goals and described an “ideal future” (long-term goals), as well as short-term goals with actionable steps.

Workshop objectives:

• Establish and understand the company’s objectives for Q1 and Q2 of 2019.

• Define key results needed to comply with said objectives.

• Identify problems that arose in 2018 and define solutions.

• Multidisciplinary networking between dev and design teams.

Part 1 – 2018 Pain Points

Lightning Decision Jam (LDJ) oriented towards issues that each member had during 2018. Each person will have 7- 10 min to write down pain points on post its (annoyances, mistakes, and/or concerns). Afterward, each team member will present these issues as they stick their post-its on the wall (5 min each). Lastly, the facilitator will unify post-its that represent similar issues, with the help of the rest of the team.

Remote team members — please write down 3- 4 problems that you ran into while working on the project in 2018. We will add these to the post-its on the wall.

Each participant has a certain amount of points to vote for the issues they consider should be resolved first (6 min). The facilitator will select the most voted and the group will rephrase them using the How May We structure.

Then the team will start writing solutions for the problems that were selected — maximum 3 (7 min). Then they’ll vote once again to pick a solution.

The facilitator will create a chart indicating impact and effort and the team will decide what solution will be tackled first, turning it into actionable steps that can be carried out in the short term.

Part 2 – 2019 OKRs

Remote team members — we need to ask them to send along with answers to the following questions: (1) where do you see MetaCenter in a couple of years? (2) What goals do you envision for the first and second trimesters? (3) From a personal standpoint, what goals do you want to achieve in relation to your work in MetaCenter? Feel free to add any additional notes you might have with regards to how to achieve them.

In the workshop, we’ll review and analyze all this information and debate it freely to make sure we’re all aware of the main business goals. Define long-term goals in one sentence (10- 15 min), as a team.

Then we’ll answer the long-term question individually, taking into consideration the company’s goals. Present post-its by placing them on the wall and briefly explaining them (5 min each). As a team, we rephrase the long term goals on the wall to form a single team goal.

Team members write as many short-term and personal goals as they wish (7 min) and present them as they add their post-its to the wall. Each team member votes for the short goals they consider most important and a maximum of 5 or 6 are selected (this can vary depending on how many goals we have). We can try to set these goals for either the first or second trimester and define 4–5 quantifiable key results as well as actionable steps to achieve them.

During the exercise, the participants shared so much input that it’s extremely important for the facilitator to be structured when collecting all the data because if this doesn’t get documented, the exercise will have been pointless. Also, it’s really important to create a good deliverable for the client, with all the info both accessible and easy to understand.

The deliverables were entered into a spreadsheet, where all the post-its are visible in columns, organized according to the votes they received, and two docs, one where the client can find all the actionable steps to solve the problem that the team believed need an urgent solution and a second and longer doc, where all the short and long term business goals were described.

I recommend these exercises for any kind of project that is in a stage of initiation or others that are more advanced and are having problems finding the right path.

The structure is written above and following each step makes it more dynamic and organized, but it’s important to know that when things get going, everything can change and as a facilitator, you need to be open to everything that is happening so as to not limit the creativity of a multidisciplinary team. However, it’s important to not give into constant brainstorming and know when to stop and choose a path to be able to keep moving forward with the steps established in the exercise structure.