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So typically what we did was we started a project and we jumped right into just kind of sketching,

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you know, wire framing, user flows.

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But typically what you want to do is before you start a project, you want to understand why you are

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starting the project.

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You want to understand basically what the problem is and why we should solution for it.

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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.

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And that is what I call a product alignment canvas.

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Now, that may sound a little scary or intimidating, but trust me, it isn't.

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It's just about asking some basic questions about why we should be doing something and also learning

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a bit about our assumptions around our users and other things.

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So let's get started.

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Essentially, what we want to do is we want to get everyone in the same room who is involved in the

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project.

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That can mean the product team, client, stakeholders, users.

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Now, the product team probably consists of yourself, maybe other designers, developers, product

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managers.

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Kuai the client usually has like maybe one person in maybe 50 people.

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There may be a CEO.

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There's so many people, but the people who really determine the success of the project should be in

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this meeting.

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Now, you could have used in this meeting users could be like existing or potential users, but generally

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they aren't.

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And you don't have the time line to probably get a user in a meeting like this.

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So you would need to make a lot of assumptions and we'll get to how to validate those.

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After all, these people are going to contribute to the success of the project.

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So much information and expertise is what they hold.

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Now, there's a sense of proper opinion on the subject matter that you're going to have to basically

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pull out of these people.

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So you really want to practice your facilitation skills, because what we're going to be doing is we're

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going to be asking a lot of questions and we'd be brainstorming.

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And as you can see, I kind of have this template here.

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And what I've done is there's a plug in.

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Right here called Project Planet.

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Now, let's wait for that to open, but what product planner does is it gives us a bunch of different

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templates on different things, like we have a brainstorming template, basically product and planning

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or management planning template.

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So here are a couple of this assumption.

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Grids, there's road maps can then boards.

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If you're familiar with Agile, we have a charts, retrospective documents.

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So there's a bunch of different things that you can use.

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We even have a persona template, so I've just kind of taken them from here.

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What I would do is because they're all in like vector format, you can't really change the copy here.

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As you can see, I would take these templates and make them your own so that way you can reduce them

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over time.

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So let's jump right in.

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Now, there's several different parts of a product alignment canvas.

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The goal is to explore, understand and to move forward.

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We want to do is we want to get to the bottom of the requirements and what we need to do for our project.

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Now we need to understand what success will look like in all different aspects, whether that's the

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business aspect, whether that's based off of users.

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And that's why we're coming together to brainstorm here.

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Now, at the beginning of any project, you generally know very little, you know, who are the users?

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Why do they want this?

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What are we solving for and you generally don't have much time to be up and running.

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We often need to literally hit the ground running.

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So what we're going to need is you can either use Fatemah, I've done this remotely, either do this

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in person, which is probably best.

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But generally, you would need a whiteboard, you would need the most important people in the room,

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some Post-it notes, markers, it would be great to have a note taker there to help you.

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And one thing that's incredibly important is to have somewhere where you can jot down all your risky

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assumptions, so this little resource that I pulled from that plug in is really great.

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Generally, I'll just list them and then we can rank them after we're done the canvass.

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But this actually plots them on some sort of graph here where we can delegate if they're risky.

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How much of an assumption they are high and low risk are on the vertical axis and on horizontal axis.

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We have the uncertain and certain.

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So how much of an assumption this is?

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So this could be anywhere like we don't know what the architecture of the app is going to be.

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We have a good understanding, but this is high risk and we need to figure this out ASAP.

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So that would be placed there or we don't know who our users are, but we're gonna make a bunch of assumptions

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about them.

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That's a very high risk card and you would feel pretty uncertain.

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So that's something you would prioritize first.

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And what we do next is we focus on the project goals, target users and a user journey.

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In our next video, we're going to be talking about project goals.