With your pitches ready, you are now ready to call a cycle planning meeting and place bets on your most promising campaigns.
Here is a meta-script for the meeting.
Required: Core team
Optional: Stakeholders
30 minutes
Briefly set the stage for why you’re here. Then set your work-in-progress (WIP) limit.
You can’t possibly work on all possible proposals so set a limit on the number of campaigns you select for each cycle.
A good starting rule of thumb is to divide the number of core team members by two. So for a team of five, the maximum number of campaigns to aim for is three. If you’re new to the validation framework, less is more — two is even better.
With the WIP limits established, the goal for voting should be striving for a meritocratic approach that surfaces the best proposals without bias or peer influence. Keeping written pitches anonymous at first and having team members cast votes silently is an effective way of achieving this.
The logic behind silent voting is that the best ideas usually stand out on their own. Give everyone votes to match your WIP limit and have them select their top campaigns.
After votes are cast, use this time to reveal the campaign author (if anonymous), break a tie, make suggestions, or gain clarity on the selected campaigns.
Hand over responsibility to selected campaign authors. They are responsible for driving the campaign to completion with the help of the rest of the team.