Scoping Session
Invite decision-makers to narrow the domain and scope for your project.
What is Scoping Session?
A Scoping Session is a collaborative validation technique where startups invite key decision-makers and stakeholders to help define and narrow the boundaries of their project or solution. This structured workshop format allows entrepreneurs to tap into the expertise and real-world knowledge of potential customers, partners, or industry experts to better understand the problem space and identify the most viable opportunities to pursue.
This technique is particularly valuable for early-stage startups that may be facing a broad problem space or multiple potential market segments. By bringing together decision-makers who have direct experience with the challenges you're trying to solve, you can quickly identify which aspects of your solution are most critical, which market segments offer the best opportunities, and what constraints or requirements must be considered. The collaborative nature ensures that the resulting scope is grounded in real market needs rather than assumptions.
Scoping Sessions serve as both a validation tool and a relationship-building opportunity. While gathering crucial insights about problem definition and market opportunities, you're also establishing connections with potential early adopters, advisors, or partners who are already invested in helping shape your solution.
When to Use This Experiment
- When you have a broad problem space and need to identify the most promising opportunity areas to focus on
- During the early discovery phase when you're unsure which customer segment or use case to prioritize
- When entering a new industry or market where you lack domain expertise and insider knowledge
- If you're pivoting and need to redefine your project scope based on new learnings
- When you have access to potential customers or industry experts willing to collaborate
- Before investing significant resources in development to ensure you're solving the right problem
- When your solution could apply to multiple industries and you need to choose your beachhead market
How to Run This Experiment
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Identify and recruit participants: Reach out to 4-8 decision-makers who represent your target market or have relevant industry expertise. Look for people who have budget authority or influence over purchasing decisions in your problem space.
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Prepare a structured agenda: Create a 90-120 minute session outline that includes problem statement presentation, open discussion phases, prioritization exercises, and constraint identification. Prepare materials like whiteboards, sticky notes, and constraint worksheets.
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Present your initial problem hypothesis: Start the session by clearly articulating your current understanding of the problem space, potential solutions, and target markets. Keep this presentation brief (10-15 minutes) to leave maximum time for discussion.
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Facilitate collaborative problem exploration: Guide participants through exercises to identify pain points, current solutions, and unmet needs. Use techniques like problem mapping or impact/effort matrices to structure the conversation and capture insights.
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Define scope boundaries together: Work with the group to establish what should be included and excluded from your initial focus area. Discuss technical constraints, budget limitations, regulatory requirements, and timeline considerations.
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Prioritize opportunities: Have participants vote on or rank the most compelling opportunities within the defined scope. Focus on areas where there's strong consensus about both the problem severity and solution feasibility.
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Document key decisions and next steps: Capture the agreed-upon scope, priority areas, key constraints, and any commitments for follow-up. Share a summary document with all participants within 24-48 hours.
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Plan validation follow-ups: Use the session outcomes to design specific experiments or interviews that will further validate the prioritized opportunities with a broader audience.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Cost-effective validation: Gather valuable market insights without spending money on surveys, tools, or advertising
- Expert knowledge access: Tap into the experience and domain expertise of industry insiders who understand real constraints and opportunities
- Relationship building: Establish connections with potential customers, advisors, or partners who are already invested in your success
- Rapid consensus building: Quickly align on priorities and scope with input from multiple stakeholders in a single session
- Risk reduction: Avoid pursuing opportunities that seem attractive but have hidden constraints or limited market potential
Cons
- Limited sample size: Insights come from a small group that may not represent your broader target market
- Potential bias: Participants might push the scope toward their specific needs rather than the broader market opportunity
- Scheduling challenges: Coordinating calendars of busy decision-makers can be difficult and time-consuming
- Groupthink risk: Dominant personalities might influence the group toward suboptimal conclusions
- Implementation dependency: Success relies heavily on your facilitation skills and ability to structure productive conversations
Real-World Examples
Slack's early development benefited from extensive scoping sessions with potential enterprise customers who helped define which communication and collaboration features were essential versus nice-to-have. These sessions with IT decision-makers helped Slack understand that security, integration capabilities, and administrative controls were critical for enterprise adoption, leading them to prioritize these features over consumer-focused functionality. The relationships built during these scoping sessions also became some of Slack's first enterprise customers.
Airbnb conducted informal scoping sessions with both hosts and travelers in their early days to understand which aspects of the home-sharing experience were most important to address. These conversations helped them realize that trust and safety features were more critical than initially anticipated, leading to the development of user verification, reviews systems, and host protection programs. The insights from these sessions helped Airbnb focus their limited resources on the features that would drive actual bookings rather than pursuing less impactful improvements.
Canva's founders regularly held scoping sessions with small business owners, marketers, and educators to understand which design tools and templates were most needed. These collaborative workshops helped them prioritize which features to build first and identify that ease-of-use was more important than advanced functionality for their target market. The feedback from these sessions directly influenced their decision to focus on drag-and-drop simplicity rather than competing with professional design software on feature complexity.