When you break ground on an epic for the first time you might want to run an epic kickoff. This is a discovery exercise like a story kickoff but for a broader theme of work.

Some key questions:

• who
  • will be using this feature?
  • should be involved in story kickoffs?
• what
  • will the feature do?
  • do we know about the feature and what don’t we know?
• why
  • is it important?
• when
  • do we need the feature by?
  • do we need different levels of detail in the plan?
    • if we just need an idea of approach or size we may want to plan some spikes or other investigation sooner rather than later

This is a key time to bring together designers, stakeholders and anyone involved in an epic to help plan things out to help guide the completion of the epic (without prescribing everything up-front).