Product Kickoff

Wish you could get everyone working on your product on the same page? Want to get tactical and focus on action items with a large unruly group? Want to get aligned but but find decision-makers' are slippery?

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The purpose of this meeting is to align the different stakeholders involved in building a successful product.

Building a product is tough - it requires extensive teamwork across virtually all departments and job functions, from engineering to marketing, executives to customer success, and of course customers and the market to sniff out what a successful product is. These different teams often have competing interests, live in different time zones and must work remotely, and, they usually don't see the scope of other groups work well - relying on product managers to maintain this larger POV and magically act as a facilitator between the different teams. What's more, the field of product management is quite young and evolving, and the job role isn't well defined or standardized... results are hard to measure and actionable guidance is very case-specific. This leaves many product managers to feel confused, ineffective and frustrated... but instead of letting imposter syndrome take hold, let's consider how to better set up product managers for success.

One thing product managers can all agree on, is they aim to build stakeholder buy-in and alignment across the board in order to be successful - and researchers have shown time and time again that the core skill for any group to succeed at a goal (whether its a sports team, a marriage, or a product team) - is effective communication. And with Zync's Product Kick-off template, many of the above challenges can be managed because of Zync's unparalleled ability to help people communicate and collaborate, remotely.

The zoom fatigue of product managers stops here, as the generic grid of faces, often new faces, and often from highly-varying job functions can be properly introduced, high-level expectations such as policies or timelines can be presented in more reliably and effectively, ideas can be vetted with healthy discussion until everyone is bought in. Risks of misinterpretation, unfulfilled promises and forgotten next steps can be minimized be holding more structured and engaging meetings like this - leading to more efficient alignment and ultimately your product's success.

Welcome

This Scene gets your meeting off on the right foot - let's the group of less familiar people feel comfortable, avoid awkward intros, and make good first impressions with professional, dedicated spotlight time in the video feed pop-ups on the right of the screen, while the moderator of the meeting sits on the stage on the top left to give a welcome message and generally facilitate the meeting.

Agenda

This scene helps you set the frame for your meeting - outlining the Agenda, Purpose and gives Participation Tips helps you maintain the best meeting practices possible. By organizing our thoughts on these high-level points and spelling them out upfront, both the meeting moderators as well as the guests get clarity on what to expect in this meeting.

Team Intro

This scene let's everyone get to know eachother a bit more, but with the comfort of structured discussion, using a roundtable framework - designated meeting attendees take turns speaking in equal amounts of time to speak about themselves with a cirular count-down timer (or speak to what ever topic is custom written at the top of the scene), while the rest of the group is free to react in real time with emoji's that are non-intrusive. At the end of the roundtable, the amout of time taken and reactions recieved by each member are summarized for all attendees to see.

Product Initiative Goals

This scene makes sure everyone is thinking and talking about the same thing - with embedded content and a designated speaker with a large video feed on the top right, while the rest of the attendees sit in smaller video bubbles down below. The in-window content sets the context for the discussion and has room for links and more supporting info so your guests can quickly get caught up or log that info for later review.

Timelines & Milestones

This scene gets specific, with key dates and milestones for your team to discuss and commit to live, while everyone's video feeds are listed down below and a raise hand block helps clear up any questions. This helps everyone understand the timelines the whole team is working under and synchronized efforts to avoid delays and inefficiencies.

Action Items

This scene helps you get tactical using three collaborative card lists. Attendees' video feeds along the bottom and the timer is in along top - attendees are encouraged to roll up their sleeves and input, edit, and assign action items into the interactive card list on the left, and discuss these in realtime with the group. List Roles and Responsibilities to delegate effortlessly, Collaboration methods to streamline cooperation and communication, and Focus on what needs to be done with a Next Steps list. This simple but powerful text-editor drives action and accountability by documenting the discussion for offline review and follow-up.

Q&A

This scene manages the groups literally crowded questions into a organized, smooth process, with upvoted questions, anonymity and a center stage to highlight the brave question asker. Make sure all questions are documented and addressed appropriately, to reduce misalignment, misunderstandings or skepticism that could hurt your overall team-work towards building a great product!

Closing

This scene let's you close out the meeting with a simple video grid, of now familiar faces and context for your product kick-off project.

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Want to experience this meeting first-hand, with no strings attached?

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