Pre-Q2 2023 Planning Leadership Meeting

Owned by
Alyssa Grissom (Deactivated)
Last updated: Jun 09, 2023
4 min read

What do we want to discuss? What do we want to accomplish for Q2 (and the end of the project)? Anything else that’s important to work through before Q2 Planning with the teams.

 

Overall Goal for Q2 Planning:

  1. Alignment on milestones and overall expected timelines- let’s revisit the whole of the milestones with the larger Nurse project and what we are driving towards for the business

    1. Official kickoff on April 5 is overview of goals/milestones for the quarter(but are tied to bigger goals for our projects near term)

      1. Job board - MVP needs to be delivered in Q3. We are thinking about it in 2 phases.

        1. Phase 1- “turn off Madgex” - migration of current customers to new job board <ie- our early adopters>

        2. Phase 2- Official go to market for new customers (this is new pricing, new value prop, etc)

      2. Site Redesign- in progress but delivering/deploying different elements will be delivered iteratively either come with job board release or separate/later

      3. CE Admin Migration (Clearly Undefined Team [Radicle])

      4. Nurse.com App Rebuild

    2. Do we have a document that says exactly what needs to be done for each piece of functionality?

      1. i.e Job Board - we need to have __, __, __ and this in order to be functional in phase 1

      2. After phase 1, we want to add filter/sort features, extra whatever, etc.

  2. Commitments to Q2 work

    1. We need to understand the work needed to deliver on milestones largely and can work backwards on what commitments that means for Q2 getting us more confident in a plan for the above.

    2. Outstanding dependencies defined

      1. Other areas that are critical/risks or necessary to delivery like ECM/staging environments, data migration, etc

    3. What the teams specifically will focus on this quarter from a work perspective (which we can plot out more once we understand the overall scope/estimates)

  3. Ownership of tasks

    1. What are each of the teams responsible for in planning outcomes/deliverables

 

Action Items before/during Q2 Planning:

  1. PM & Sr. Dev to look at open tickets (in current Sprint and Backlog) to determine accuracy of:

    1. Requirements are vetted and included in ticket

    2. Status & Backlog Status

    3. MVP Phase tags added

  2. PM to create all remaining tickets for Q2 before Q2 Planning ends (or as many as we can)

    1. PM can create the FE tickets as expected, but Sr. Dev’s need to help to create the BE tickets to determine what the other requirements are

    2. Ensure all open tickets (BE or FE) have all requirements, acceptance criteria and testing instructions

    3. See more in the decisions section below

  3. What meetings/syncs/ceremonies need to be scheduled to facilitate these goals and decisions??

    1. Full meetings first

    2. Individual meetings with each squad

    3. Revisit full team meetings

  4. On the DM team, we’ve talked about setting Epics as quarterly goals so they’re easily tracked - they don’t have to differ at all from the ones that we have already been working on this quarter, but it makes sense to label them with Q1 and Q2 for now

    1. This allows us to really easily see “these things were done in Q1” and “these are the things that we have slotted for Q2”

    2. So at the end of this quarter, we can easily see what tickets remain from Q1, and that’ll give us a really good indication of where we landed, and what we may have to catch up on

 

Decisions during Q2 Planning:

  1. MoSCoW decision https://www.productplan.com/glossary/moscow-prioritization/

    1. Must

    2. Should

    3. Could

    4. Won’t

  2. T-Shirt Sizing exercise:

    1. Best way to organize Squads to work through these (will have smaller groups for these)

    2. Do we have Epics broken down into small enough chunks for the amount of work required

    3. We will be doing this with the teams during planning next week, but want to go over it with the leadership group on 3/30
      https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVMaWdWHg=/

  3. When do we need smaller vs. larger group discussions?

    1. Kickoff: Lysle & Emily to describe milestones, goals & timelines with the Eng/PM dept <this is on April 5, do we want another smaller team kickoff and when?>

      1. Lysle, Matt & Emily to work through what’s required through Q3 first, then will go back and decide what needs to be done specifically in Q2

      2. Schedule a kickoff meeting with the team before the full kickoff to give everyone an idea of the goals

    2. What are the bodies of work we’re committing to complete during Q2?

      1. Ask for a basic idea of capacity for Q2 if it’s known (vacations, etc.)

  4. Super Nurse readout:

    1. Should this be one readout? or do we need/want to do Krypton/BlueDot separately?

    2. Who does the actual read out? Do I do this, or is it Lysle or Emily?

  5. Pointing exercise:

    1. Is everyone on the same page for what point values reflect?

    2. Open discussion if there are differences

  6. Should there be one story for the overall functionality and sub-tasks for the FE and BE piece?

    1. or keep doing what we’re doing ?

    2. My thought (Alyssa) would be separate since they would have different LOE, different points, different timing (which Sprint(s) they’ll be in, etc.), dependencies, etc.

      1. PM can create one ticket with “this is the functionality needed” with the idea of the FE piece

      2. During refinement, we can discuss what the BE piece looks like and create a specific ticket for that one & flag it as a blocker to the FE ticket

      3. FE ticket won’t be pulled into a Sprint until the BE ticket is complete

      4. I don’t mind taking ownership of working through these with PM and Eng to ensure we have everything we need

      5. Christian/Sean - please weigh in here

  7. Need confirmation:

    1. What are we doing when it comes to actual work during planning week?

      1. Are people expected to actually be working on tickets/testing?

      2. Do we cancel standup, retro, refinement, etc.? I think yes since we should be spending most of our time planning out each sprint for the quarter

    2. Where is blog on the priority list? Isn’t that being de-prioritized with the profile, employer/salary pages?

 

Important Reminders:

  1. If a new ticket is created (bug, story, etc.) by anyone other than PM, discuss it with them so we can determine priority

  2. Any design questions or dependencies identified --please surface to PM (or Eng managers) and we can work with design on unblocking

  3. Reiterate open and honest discussion