Goal of this stage: generate the information necessary to complete the next step. Reduce uncertainty.

Doing this right is very time consuming. So, it’s really useful, for efficiency sake alone, that you’ve done a good job of cutting things and having the resulting difficult tradeoff conversations before you get to this point, not after or during. All of the big decisions should have been made already before you get here, or you will be wasting a collosal amount of time. This should be an exercise in science, not politics.

Expect this step to take a long time. If you are cold-starting this process (i.e. you don’t have a head start from stuff you refined in the previous planning cycle that didn’t quite make the cut) then it’s very likely this step will take longer than you have, actually, to do. You might need to cut it short and try again next cycle for the sake of getting down to business.

This is the place where you really make the tradeoffs around time and scope. You have to identify the project’s goals. They must be SMART goals. The Product team and the Engineering team should be collaborating intensely to define what needs to be done and roughly how it will be done. Different approaches and their plusses and minuses should be surfaced, so the team can commit to one. Dogwaggers should be identified and comitted to. If you don’t do these things, then that’s potentially still ok, It’s the reality of life in business. But it also means you can’t expect a commitment to delivery. That’s just the reality of life, too.