Release Planning, 1 or 2-Day Workshop

The Release Planning workshop is designed to get the team ready to deliver their next 3-6 month release. The focus of this workshop is to establish the product and technology direction of release, identify major delivery risks, and create the master prioritized product backlog. This workshop is typically conducted as a 2-day, onsite session, with everyone that will participate in building the product.

Product Vision – The team will work with their product owner to establish the strategic direction of the product, understand their intended market, and major features and functionality of the product.

Product Architecture – The team will work together to translate the Product Vision into a high level solutions architecture that will guide the creation of the emerging system.

Risk Backlog – The team will identify the significant business and technical risks that are most likely to derail the release. This backlog will be used to guide the prioritization of the feature backlog.

Value Identification – The team will work with the Product Owner to identify what features are driving value in the release and help the business quantify the potential ROI of the product.

Story Mapping – The team will brainstorm with the Product Owner to identify all the user stories that might possibly be built to deliver the higher level value feature.

Minimal Marketable Features – The team will work with the Product Owner to identify the smallest set of user stories necessary to deliver the value associated with the feature.

Estimating – The team will assign high level estimates to the product features, and use planning poker to estimate the story point values of the user stories.

Release Roadmap – Using the concepts of Value Delivery, Minimal Marketable Features, and Agile Estimating; the team will craft the high level scope and timing for the product release.