Often, at the beginning of a new project, there are big decisions to be made in a short amount of time. Navigating through these time-strapped, decision-making processes can be stressful and, I have found, it can be difficult to stay focused under pressure. In this post, I will share how focusing on creating a “napkin spec” helped me stay on track as my team and I decided on our Online Capstone project idea.
To give some context, this week, at the start of the Online Capstone class, our team had only a couple days to choose the project idea(s) that we would work on for the entire term. With an attitude of “No, stay focused this time!”, I decided to adopt a mental model to help me stay focused and productive while we discussed our options. My personal solution was to frame my choices around creating a deliverable for our project idea, namely, a “napkin spec”.
I recently saw the term napkin spec while I was browsing through the interwebs. And while I don’t recall where I saw the term, I do remember the immediate appeal of an early-project specifications document… written on a napkin! The napkin spec is the blend of a product requirements document and a napkin pitch. There is just enough room to fit information about the core features of the product. There is also just enough room at the napkin’s edge (that ridged, bumpy part, if we’re talking cocktail napkins) for the product pitch. There is no room for hesitations, and what ifs, and any other sort of padding that increases the scope of the project beyond it’s nascent stage. The specific format I was going for was a concise bullet point list of features for our project’s product.
The napkin spec was the perfect litmus test to all my choices; a great way to narrow down all the different big ideas into a short-list of ones that fit my and my teammates’ interests and constraints. If one of my suggestions didn’t bring us closer to creating a napkin spec, then I threw that idea out. This worked well and eased the mental load of sifting through the numerous projects we were all interested in, to just a couple that fit the bill, for all of us.
The beauty of the napkin spec is that once we narrowed down the list, and decided that a new project proposal was our top choice, we were able to create the napkin spec to send over to our professor for review and approval. So, as an aside, we did add a couple stretch-goal features and included a motivations section, but I think it was OK for this context.
By focusing on the deliverable, specifically a pared-down, concise summary of a big idea, my team and I were able to go from a nebulous, multi-directional discussion to communicating in a focused and compact format. Win!
I look forward to using the napkin spec strategy for new projects in the future!
