So typically what we did was we started a project and we jumped right into just kind of sketching,
you know, wire framing, user flows.
But typically what you want to do is before you start a project, you want to understand why you are
starting the project.
You want to understand basically what the problem is and why we should solution for it.
So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to bring you through a different type of way to start a project.
And that is what I call a product alignment canvas.
Now, that may sound a little scary or intimidating, but trust me, it isn't.
It's just about asking some basic questions about why we should be doing something and also learning
a bit about our assumptions around our users and other things.
So let's get started.
Essentially, what we want to do is we want to get everyone in the same room who is involved in the
project.
That can mean the product team, client, stakeholders, users.
Now, the product team probably consists of yourself, maybe other designers, developers, product
managers.
Kuai the client usually has like maybe one person in maybe 50 people.
There may be a CEO.
There's so many people, but the people who really determine the success of the project should be in
this meeting.
Now, you could have used in this meeting users could be like existing or potential users, but generally
they aren't.
And you don't have the time line to probably get a user in a meeting like this.
So you would need to make a lot of assumptions and we'll get to how to validate those.
After all, these people are going to contribute to the success of the project.
So much information and expertise is what they hold.
Now, there's a sense of proper opinion on the subject matter that you're going to have to basically
pull out of these people.
So you really want to practice your facilitation skills, because what we're going to be doing is we're
going to be asking a lot of questions and we'd be brainstorming.
And as you can see, I kind of have this template here.
And what I've done is there's a plug in.
Right here called Project Planet.
Now, let's wait for that to open, but what product planner does is it gives us a bunch of different
templates on different things, like we have a brainstorming template, basically product and planning
or management planning template.
So here are a couple of this assumption.
Grids, there's road maps can then boards.
If you're familiar with Agile, we have a charts, retrospective documents.
So there's a bunch of different things that you can use.
We even have a persona template, so I've just kind of taken them from here.
What I would do is because they're all in like vector format, you can't really change the copy here.
As you can see, I would take these templates and make them your own so that way you can reduce them
over time.
So let's jump right in.
Now, there's several different parts of a product alignment canvas.
The goal is to explore, understand and to move forward.
We want to do is we want to get to the bottom of the requirements and what we need to do for our project.
Now we need to understand what success will look like in all different aspects, whether that's the
business aspect, whether that's based off of users.
And that's why we're coming together to brainstorm here.
Now, at the beginning of any project, you generally know very little, you know, who are the users?
Why do they want this?
What are we solving for and you generally don't have much time to be up and running.
We often need to literally hit the ground running.
So what we're going to need is you can either use Fatemah, I've done this remotely, either do this
in person, which is probably best.
But generally, you would need a whiteboard, you would need the most important people in the room,
some Post-it notes, markers, it would be great to have a note taker there to help you.
And one thing that's incredibly important is to have somewhere where you can jot down all your risky
assumptions, so this little resource that I pulled from that plug in is really great.
Generally, I'll just list them and then we can rank them after we're done the canvass.
But this actually plots them on some sort of graph here where we can delegate if they're risky.
How much of an assumption they are high and low risk are on the vertical axis and on horizontal axis.
We have the uncertain and certain.
So how much of an assumption this is?
So this could be anywhere like we don't know what the architecture of the app is going to be.
We have a good understanding, but this is high risk and we need to figure this out ASAP.
So that would be placed there or we don't know who our users are, but we're gonna make a bunch of assumptions
about them.
That's a very high risk card and you would feel pretty uncertain.
So that's something you would prioritize first.
And what we do next is we focus on the project goals, target users and a user journey.
In our next video, we're going to be talking about project goals.