There wasn’t enough time or resources for me to do all of the in engine building & sequencing - AND - direct a team of 13 people. Being the vision holder, mini-director & in-engine glue was a HUGE amount of work. After building the first two bosses - I had hard evidence that Design was the bottleneck to information & clear outcomes. To provide clear direction for all others, the design and in-engine work had to suffer - or vice versa. I couldn’t just delegate to team members who were already overloaded.

Teammates only retained so much info from the kick-off meetings - humans can only digest so much info at a time. High-level tasks only went so far. People will and do interpret different outcomes from reading design specs. They also might not understand the whollistic vision from start to end - so the devil is in the details!

I needed a way to articulate design intent, give everyone trackable action items with a clear roadmap & outcomes - but without it being a huge time sink. I couldn’t write acceptance criteria for literally thousands of tasks - that would be more than a full time job! We also needed the team to be invested and understand why they were making the things they were - not just executing on a task list.

I tried something different - a midway point between paper design & task creation. A visual roadmap & high level task breakdown in Miro.

1. Coloured Sticky Notes Per Discipline.

   • This makes it visually easy to pinpoint what’s relevant to your discipline.

2. List of high-level features / mechanics - with a snippet from the design spec.

   • This had a touchpoint and quick reminder of what the thing is and does.

3. Arrow flowcharts that highlighted dependencies.

   • This created a clear visual hierarchy of execution order or what depended on others.

It helped me as a designer figure out the high level action items for everything required to get this to an MMP standard. It removed almost all of the unknowns - an entire boss fight became quantified! It gave every discipline concrete direction what needed to be done, where it slots in, and what it depends on. They asked questions to fully understand the what’s and why’s - and contributed to EMPOWER the vision, leveraging their skills.

The next boss we created - using this solution had good concrete results! The team understood the vision from start to end, knew exactly what was required of them and where their pieces fit in, they had input and brought their expertise to the table. It freed up design to continue doing design things & in-engine work! The need for clarity and direction almost evaporated and moreso turned into showcasing when it came online. The time we spent providing direction - became time we invested in feedback and iteration.

We had multiple iterations & versions of this process over development. But it became the foundation for scoping appropriately - and building a cohesive vision within the team with absolute buy-in. Ultimately - I strongly feel that this helped us solve unkowns and fit the puzzle pieces together - to ship as much content as we did within the timeframe.

1. Complete Design Spec:

   • Initial team lookover, understanding & clarifying questions.

2. Complete MMP Miro Plan:

   • Assign priorities.

   • Schedule team-wide kick-off meetings.

3. Team-Wide MMP Kick-off Meeting:

   • Validate & answer questions.

   • Team members can leave comments or further sticky notes with relevant info or criteria.

   • Collaborate on further dependency chains.

   • Add time estimates or establish a time-box.

4. Production automates to Jira.

5. Define Boss-pod Sprint Goals

   • Each discipline set criteria that work towards the sprint goals.

6. Team-wide sprint planning & workload allocation meeting.

7. Work Begins!