Project Poster

Project posters get filled out over the course of several sessions with your team, so don't worry about doing it all in one go. In the first session, focus on defining the problem space. Then share it with your project sponsors as early as possible to get their feedback, which you'll incorporate in future sessions as your project develops.

The poster is split into 3 parts to support this evolution:

Problem space – Explain why solving this problem matters to customers and to the business. Get clear on objectives and possible solutions.

Validate assumptions – Identify knowledge gaps and risks. What do you know and what do you need to find out? 

Get ready to execute – Visualize the solution, and estimate the scope of the project.
 

HOW TO RUN EACH SESSION

Schedule 60 minutes with your team. Collect and share relevant information in advance (e.g., notes from user testing, analytics, customer feedback, market research, etc.).

Start the first session by sharing the project poster template with instructions. In future sessions, you can start by (briefly!) reviewing what's changed on the poster.

Lead your team through the questions, making sure you're basically agreed on each one before moving on to the next. If you reach a stalemate or team members have wildly different ideas, take the time to talk through them and try to reach a consensus. If you can't, someone from the team should take on a follow-up task to gather more information and share it out. Ultimately, the project's full-time owner (i.e., project manager) or executive sponsor may have to resolve differences of opinion by simply making a call on which direction to go.

As you work through each section, link off to other project artifacts that come out of other plays you might run: DACI, Experience Canvas, Trade-off Sliders, etc.

The "Problem space" section captures the project's reason for existence. This section should include just enough detail that someone outside your team can understand why you're considering the project and its objectives.

You'll probably revisit your problem space several times before you're ready to execute. As feedback from sponsors and stakeholders comes in, teams often find they haven’t been asking the right questions or haven’t met the customer’s needs. You might also find that your assumptions weren’t exactly spot-on.

Don’t stress. This is normal. Come back to this section of the project poster and work through the questions again. (And again, and again, if that’s what it takes.)

Defining the problem space will force you to make assumptions that need to be validated so your team and sponsors are confident in your solution. Initially, this section of the poster amounts to a to-do list. As the project moves along and you record your findings here, it provides an overview of your validation efforts, and the information you've gathered.

Your research should confirm (or disprove) the solution and its relative priority before you go any further. If you can't do this, you may need to revisit the problem space or brainstorm more solutions to consider. For massive projects, this can take weeks, or even months, to work through. 

As your research progresses, update this section with summaries of what you've found and links to supporting documentation. 

This section will be empty when you first create the project poster, but you'll fill it in as you reach conclusions around which solution to pursue, an idealized vision of what you'll deliver, and what it'll take to deliver it. 

Involving multiple team members with diverse skills sets in the "ready to go" phase helps ensure you capture all aspects of what you'll deliver and develop that all-important shared understanding.