Feature Breakdown Workshop — Usability
When to Implement
Each of the following Scenarios can be used to determine if now is the right time for you to conduct a Feature Breakdown Workshop.
Early in the Project Life Cyle: Helps define features before development begins, ensuring alignment.
Before Major Releases: Useful for refining scope and prioritizing features for upcoming product launches.
During Roadmap Planning: Supports strategic decision-making by breaking down features for long-term planning.
After User Research or Feedback: Helps incorporate insights from customers into feature prioritization.
Quarterly or Annual Planning Sessions: Large organizations may schedule workshops as part of regular planning cycles.
Before Sprint Planning (Agile Teams): Ensures clarify on feature details before development sprints begin.
Prerequisites
Clear Objectives – Define the purpose and expected outcomes of the workshop to keep discussions focused.
Right Participants – Involve key stakeholders, including product owners, developers, designers, and business analysts, to ensure diverse perspectives.
Skilled Facilitator – A neutral and experienced facilitator helps guide discussions, manage conflicts, and keep the session productive.
Structured Agenda – Prepare a detailed agenda outlining discussion points, activities, and time allocations to maintain efficiency.
Pre-Workshop Preparation – Share relevant documents, background information, and expectations with participants beforehand to maximize engagement.
Collaborative Environment – Choose a conducive setting with necessary tools like whiteboards, sticky notes, or digital collaboration platforms.
Defined Prioritization Criteria – Establish a framework for evaluating and prioritizing features based on business value, feasibility, and user needs.
Follow-Up Plan – Document key takeaways, assign action items, and schedule follow-ups to ensure implementation of workshop outcomes.
Roles & Responsibilities
Facilitator: takes an unbiased approach to the workshop, ensuring collaboration, clarifying scores and applying criteria consistently to each item in the list. Typically a Release Train Engineer, a Portfolio Manager, a Scrum Master, or someone equipped in leadership facilitates the WSJF Workshop.
Pro-Tip: Having a Leader or Individual Contributor, who is really close to the work, facilitate the Feature Breakdown workshop can result in conflict and a biased outcome. Look for someone outside of the work to facilitate, especially for the first time.
Product Manager/Product Owner: provides clear business context and value insights for each item. This context can help stakeholders accurately assess business value, urgency, and safer/better components for delay cost.
Pro-Tip: Product Owners should focus on what is being built and why, not necessarily on how. While their input on business value is absolutely critical, be sure to get IT and Architecture’s input on the level of effort.
Key Stakeholders: bring domain knowledge, strategic priorities, and unique/critical perspectives. These stakeholders, when included in the process, will not only feel included in the work, but may become champions and emissaries of the process for many years to come.
Pro-Tip: Determining the right Key Stakeholders is critical. Look for influencers, Leadership Partners, and those that will be most familiar with the items in the list to prioritize.
Business Analyst: helps define feature scope, ensures alignment with business goals, and documents insights.
Subject Matter Experts: provide clarifying details, ensuring items are well-understood by everyone involved. They often provide business impact, dependencies, and technical feasibility.
Enterprise Architect: provides technical oversight into architectural dependencies, future enablement, and long-term scalability, helping ensure that prioritization decisions align with the organization’s technical strategy.
NOTE: Recommended Headcount: 5-10 people. Including additional people typically slows down the process without significantly improving the outcomes of the Feature Breakdown Workshop.
Scheduling and Timeline
Feature Breakdown sessions are essential when high-level features or epics have been identified but need to be decomposed into smaller, actionable user stories or capabilities. These sessions ensure that teams have a shared understanding of scope and can plan effectively for upcoming Program Increments (PIs).
Key times to consider a Feature Breakdown Workshop for large programs and portfolios:
- After initial feature identification. Once a list of features or epics has been gathered—typically from business stakeholders, product management, or strategic planning—schedule a breakdown session at least 4+ weeks prior to the first PI Planning. This ensures teams have time to refine and estimate stories.
- Before each PI Planning event. Conduct breakdown sessions 1–2 weeks before PI Planning to ensure that features are well-understood, split into right-sized stories, and ready for estimation and prioritization.
- On a regular cadence. Schedule recurring sessions monthly or bi-monthly to continuously refine the backlog. This cadence helps accommodate new features, evolving priorities, and feedback from previous increments.
Ideally, a Feature Breakdown session should occur 2–4 weeks before PI Planning to allow sufficient time for refinement and validation. Features identified for upcoming work often require deeper exploration from both a technical and product perspective before they are ready for team-level planning. This ensures that stories are appropriately sized, dependencies are identified, and teams are set up for successful execution during the PI.
Consulting Effort
If you are a consultant, understanding the amount of effort to conduct a Feature Breakdown session might inform how much time you reserve, and how much you charge for it. For those of you that do Value-Based contracts, the value the company receives from a Feature Breakdown session will vary considerably.
For organizations, working on the wrong item first can be quite expensive, and struggling to make a decision on where to start can be even more costly.
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