How to facilitate a project

We breakdown work into projects. A project can be a new/improved feature, a process change, or a bundle of work related to a goal.

Most projects have multiple members participating in them across multiple teams. The project facilitator plays a specific role to help the project's success.

Initiate information gathering

Especially when a project starts, information is required.

• What is the scope?
• What will it take to build?
• Are there design partners we should include?
• What is the low-fidelity design/architecture?

Often, this starts as a meeting to openly discuss and is then documented as an RFC. The facilitator doesn't need to gather the information, but they are coordinating the information gathering process with the other members.

Organize the work

Once the scope of work is understood, the facilitator should make ensure this work is broken down into tasks and added to the Linear project.

The more detailed this work is broken down, the easier it is to track progress and identify blockers.

Unblock the team

Each project team will operate differently. The facilitator should find ways to get pulse checks from the team to identify tasks that are stuck or need help.

Breaking down work into sprints in linear can help identify which tasks are completing as expected.

Unblocking will look different case by case. It could be simply spawning a discussion, bringing up resource constraints to the whole team, re-assigning work within the team to play to people's strengths, or proposing a new scope.

Give updates on progress

We may have a dozen projects moving at a given time. Staying organized and maintaining visibility across the company is critical.

The facilitator encourages the team to keep linear updated so progress is visible async. Projects should be updated before the all-hands meeting every Monday so that all project statuses can be shown.

If a project is at risk, the facilitator may be asked to provide a more detailed update in the all-hands meeting.

Push for a shippable v0

The faster we can get code or content into other people's hands, the faster we receive the richest type of feedback.

The facilitator should push the team to get a v0 out behind a feature flag as soon as possible to share with the rest of the company and design partners. This is often done by breaking down the work into phases keeping the team focused on one phase at a time.