Recently we started working with the IT division of a large client that embarked upon their digital transformation journey. Before we got engaged by the IT side, the business side of the client was working with a ‘big 5’ consulting firm for the last 2 years to help them define that journey. They were trying to define a roadmap of features and functionalities to build and order them by priority on a roadmap. A two week offsite workshop was conducted where the business leaders from around the globe were invited along with the IT team (and us) to help “collect” the requirements. The workshops were facilitated very professionally and over 500 different “epics” or “stories” were listed down. Few were well thought out stories, many were one or two liner epics, and others were somewhere in between.
At the end of the two week workshop began an exercise of prioritizing those taking into account the technical complexity, business process readiness etc. Three more weeks later, it was whittled down to about 300, but the team was nowhere near defining a crisp MVP (Minimum Viable Product). Given we were on a fixed bid discovery engagement and needed to have an MVP defined in 6-8 weeks, which was not coming (atleast in the timeline of our engagement) it was time for me to act. I worked with the IT leadership first asking a very fundamental question. Can you explain in a sentence or two of what your MVP does that is easily understood by your customers (users) and executives? It needs to be a teaser and prompt them to ask immediately, “when can I get my hands on it?” In about an hour, I helped craft a couple of sentences, which they liked and they pushed it in the next large meeting between Business and IT. It was lapped up by business as well and we had a high level definition of the MVP.
We then looked at the body of requirements from the lens of this definition and 22 stories/epics were remaining to be done which we took up for further elaboration and sized for an MVP.
The whole point of this story is that many times when we are flooded with a clutter of “things to do”, it helps to take a step back and articulate in a sentence or two of where exactly are we creating value and for whom. This is an age old principle which has been famously applied by Steve Jobs in his second innings at Apple in 1997 where he killed a plethora of product lines to stop the bleeding and create bandwidth /funding to come up with their next “big thing” , which we all now know was the ipod/ iphone product line.
tvprasad 
Words of wisdom