About Us

Flight Plan

Flight Planning is an intensive week-long process that culminates with the delivery of a Flight Plan Document: your plan to help you launch your project quickly and with minimal waste.

Why Flight Planning?

Flight Planning is your map and guide to a successful launch. We help you create a detailed, visual plan of your project and outline everything that we need to build for success.

Critical Path

New projects are constantly pulled in a dozend different directions. Your app needs many different features—how do you decide what to build first?

The path to shipping your validated MVP in the fewest number of steps is your Critical Path. It's a list of steps and milestones that must be reached in order for validated learning to happen, and ultimate, to successfully launch your project.

Is Flight Planning right for you?

We do Flight Planning before every new project that we take on. We don't only do it for our clients, we also regularly do flight planning for every internal project that we do.

While we believe flight planning is an important first step for every new project, it's not always the right time. Use these tips to decide whether you're at a place to begin the Flight Planning process, or whether you're still in the ideation stage.

You're ready for Flight Planning if:

  • You've completed the Lean Canvas excercise
  • You have a good idea of who your customers are, what problem you'll be solving, and how you'll be solving it
  • You have a budget set aside for development (See our Pricing Guide)

How does Flight Planning work?

Kickoff Meeting

Flight Planning kicks off with a full day meeting where we break out the sharpies and sketch out the Critical Path for your project.

If practical, I’ll come to your location. We can meet at your office, or I’ll book a meeting space. Lunch will be provided.

At the end of the day we’ll have a pile of notes and I’ll have a good idea of the scope of the app. The goal of this meeting is to discover:

  • The unique value that your app provides
  • The various users who will be using your app
  • Any particular technical requirements (API access, etc.)

Design Sprint

I’ll spend the next five days creating wireframes, visual mockups, and a critical path document that will clearly outline everything about the product.

The critical path document will contain:

  • Technical requirements
  • Business goals of the product
  • User personas
  • First-person user walkthroughs from the perspective of each user persona
  • Wireframes of key screens
  • Project proposal and bid

Retrospective

We’ll meet in person if possible, otherwise via video conference. We’ll need to set aside at least two uninterrupted hours for this meeting, and we’ll need all the stakeholders to be present. The purpose of this meeting will be to go over the Flight Plan Document. You’ll have an opportunity to ask any questions or clarifications, and to submit revisions.

At this point you’ll have a complete Flight Plan Document. This document will serve as the foundation, the blueprint to guide the development of your MVP. Obviously we hope you’ll have us work on the next part of the project, but you don’t have to.

Ready to find out more?

Sometimes it helps just to talk things through. That's why we offer a free introductory strategy session. We'll get on the phone together, and then ask you some questions and listen to your vision for your product. At the end we'll try to offer constructive feedback and help you decide if Flight Planning is the right next step for you.


Ready to Build Something Together?

Get in touch