How to Prepare for a Frogslayer VDP

When you want to build, launch, and scale a new product, minimizing time to value is important. That is, you want to move quickly while reducing risk in pursuit of your new product.

Our approach to helping you reach that goal is our Validation, Design, and Planning (VDP) engagement. The VDP is a potential outcome of Pre-Project Consulting, our initial conversation that allows our team to align services best to fit the needs and opportunities of your business. The VDP is a customized multi-week engagement with clients to de-risk the endeavor and accelerate development.

Throughout that VDP engagement, we collaborate with you to understand your business, define your goals and objectives, validate assumptions and ideas along the way, and finally paint a clear picture of the right solution and a roadmap to get there. The right solution will meet the needs of your end users and the business objectives; the VDP is critical to minimizing time to value and de-risking software projects from the start.  

For those clients who committed to go through the VDP engagement, we’ve seen huge improvements in final outcomes and reduced time to value. 

While we will guide you through the VDP, there are some things you can do to prepare your team for success during the engagement. In this article, we’ll discuss a few key success multipliers.

Planning Your Project/Product

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Before the VDP Kickoff

If anything seems intimidating, don’t worry, we’ll walk you through it. 

Assemble a group of stakeholders—that is, people who are interested in or concerned about the problem and solution or who will contribute something valuable to the process. 

Having the right stakeholder mix is important. You will want good representation from the business sponsor, product owner, project manager or coordinator, subject matter experts, technology experts, and internal users.  

Having the right number of stakeholders is important, too. 

• If your organization has many interested stakeholders in a particular group, consider nominating a single point of contact for that group to be involved in the VDP activities with Frogslayer.
• In some organizations, people may wear multiple hats and represent different concerns, leading to a smaller stakeholder group. That’s okay!

Everyone’s business has unique and special characteristics, and our team excels at learning new subjects very quickly.

“I wanted to compliment your team on the process so far. The initial discovery event was facilitated so well, and I felt that when the two days were done, you all understood our problem to solve and needs very well. I was impressed.“
– Product Executive, Educational Coaching Firm

• Send over as much information as you can, not only about the problem and potential solution you have in mind, but any kind of background information on your business, the market, your users, competitors, challenges, long-range company plans, prior failed attempts, prior success, technical architecture, roadmaps, documentation, diagrams, prototypes, vision decks, etc. Leverage your stakeholder team to collect this information. Don’t worry about overwhelming us — we encourage you to send everything, even if it might be outdated. It helps us understand your goals, challenges, and background context.
  • We’ve yet to have a client send us too much information in this phase, and we often find ourselves asking for material related to what we’re learning along the way.

We’ll Start Planning the Initial Workshop with You

This is a 1 to 5-day facilitated workshop in which we aim to assess your organization’s current state, understand your product goals across near, mid-, and long-term horizons, and identify priorities, timelines, risks, concerns, and budgetary constraints.  

The workshop facilitator will help us all align on goals, minimize risk and uncertainty, foster team cohesion, and culminate in the creation of a battle plan for the next actions and phases of the VDP. 

Secrets to planning to attend our workshop: 

• Choose the right attendees. It is critical to have good representation across stakeholder concerns, as well as having the decision-makers in the room. 
• In-person is much better than virtual or hybrid. We love to host in-person workshops at our Frogslayer offices, which have floor-to-ceiling markerboard walls and fine Texas hospitality!  
• Everyone should be there for the entire session. When people don’t plan to attend the entire week (by dropping in and out of sessions), we see wasted time, loss of context, repetition, and low-quality interactions. These risks directly impact the effectiveness of the workshop and the overall VDP. 
• If your organization would like us to come to you, we’re happy to do so. In this case, we’ll coordinate with your team to ensure we have the necessary space, environment, and resources to have protected and productive time together. 

If I had to choose only three things that are the most critical to a productive workshop, it would be an in-person session, having the right mix of attendees, and adequate facilities.  

During the Initial Workshop

We’ll send over a high-level agenda ahead of time, but keep in mind that the activities during the week will flex: we’re outcome-driven, not agenda-driven. Remember that we want to assess the current state of your organization, understand your product goals across near, mid-, and long-term horizons, and identify priorities, timelines, risks, concerns, and budgetary constraints. Our workshop facilitator and our portfolio of activities will help guide everyone to meet those goals. 

We will have some homework for you: we ask the product owner or sponsor to give a 10-to-30-minute presentation to the group early on the first day. We want to hear about the background, goals, and vision of the opportunity and solution in mind. Often, we find that some of the other stakeholders in the room learn something from this presentation, or a lack of alignment among your team comes to the foreground. This is okay, and a big part of why we do this workshop! 

We want folks to be able to focus and be free of distractions. While we recognize that emergencies crop up, we try to keep the session as free of electronics as possible. If you need a room to take an important call, let us know, and we’ll set you up in a private huddle room. 

We’ll have time for breaks and will bring in lunch during the week. Let us know if you have any dietary needs or restrictions. If your schedule allows, we like to get the entire team together for a dinner outing. 

At the end of the workshop, everyone should be leaving feeling aligned and energized, and with a plan for the next few weeks of the engagement.

During the Multi-Week VDP Engagement

During the rest of the VDP engagement, several workstreams will be in progress: product strategy, user research, product design, solution architecture, proof-of-concept investigation, technical feasibility assessments, technical deep-dives, and more, all overseen by our delivery team’s project management expertise. 

The Product Design team will need 2x or 3x weekly design meetings with a smaller stakeholder team, usually the Product Owner and a subject-matter expert or two.  

In addition, the Product Design team will ask for offline review of proposed designs (taking 1-2 hours per week) to keep the design meetings efficient.  

If you have existing development or IT team stakeholders, the engineering team will need several technical deep-dive meetings early in the engagement, followed by regular touchpoints with those technical stakeholders on your team. If you don’t have an existing IT team, don’t worry, Frogslayer brings that expertise to the table. 

Finally, our user research team may have several activities planned that would need some time and assistance from your team:

• Stakeholder interviews – typically 30-minute interviews for background and context 
• User surveys and interviews – if learning from your end-users is identified as an important risk-reduction or validation effort, our research team will need help identifying your users and getting contact information. Don’t worry; we’ll guide you through the process and handle the details. Even if you’ve researched or surveyed your users, you’d be surprised at what insights you might learn.  
• Field research 

UX & Design

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Here are some risk factors that we sometimes see during project planning: 

• The Product Owner can’t make rapid, informed decisions along the way. 
• Subject Matter Experts aren’t available to effectively convey critical background knowledge, or the information is contradictory or outdated with your company’s processes.  
• Business Sponsors aren’t along for the journey and change direction at the last minute. 
• The team tries to pack too many features into an early-stage product.

After the VDP

At the end of the VDP engagement, you’ll receive your set of Validation, Design, and Planning deliverables that document our collaborative journey and the results: we’ll reflect our understanding of your business, illustrate your goals and objectives, and show validated assumptions and ideas along the way. Finally, we paint a clear picture of the right solution and a roadmap it will take to get to the solution that meets the needs of your end users and the business objectives. You’ll get an accurate cost and schedule estimate for your software project. 

“Everyone’s ability to really understand what we’re trying to do is just impressive and exciting. Y’all have picked up on everything quickly without a lot of explanation. This has given us a lot of confidence to move forward.“
– Operations Executive, networking solutions company

From here, we can’t wait to build your product and get you on your way to realizing your vision for your product and business.

Think a VDP Engagement is the right leap for your business? Let’t talk. 

• 
  Tim Scott Head of Product Strategy & Design

• Tagged In
• VDP
• Product Planning
• VDP Workshop