What is the Parking Lot Matrix template?
Cocreate a wall of ideas with your teammates during your workshops or daily standup meetings. Isolate topics that distract your team or are unrelated to your current discussion. Decide which ideas should be turned into actionable Jira items using the Parking Lot Matrix template.
The template will be handy if your teammates tend to go off-topic during your meetings. Designate one person or invite everyone to note out-of-scope ideas to park them for later use when the time and context are just right. Build a bank of valuable insights you can prioritize on a matrix and return to them whenever necessary.
What are the benefits of the Parking Lot Matrix template?
Thanks to the Parking Lot Matrix template, you can:
- Keep your conversation focused on a designated topic, especially if your participants tend to digress from the main subject.
- Catch topics or assumptions for future research that are not currently at the center of the conversation, but you don’t want to lose them.
- Decrease the time needed for workshop wrapup and outline work items and your next steps.
- Use this method during any event, like daily standup, to create a virtual storage space to store your ideas.
- Boost efficiency in your agile team by ensuring your participants’ ideas, insights, and creativity are valued and will be brought back to attention on another occasion.
How to use the Parking Lot Matrix template in a few steps?
- Briefly describe on sticky notes the purpose you want to touch upon during your meeting. This procedure will help you focus only on the relevant topics of your discussion.
- Designate someone (or encourage everyone) to write down all the topics or ideas on additional sticky notes when you stray from the primary purpose of the meeting.
- Ask all participants to place the sticky notes on the appropriate quadrant of the parking lot matrix — Look for opportunities to use, Keep on the radar, Consider later, and Do not consider.
- On the matrix:
– Remove all sticky notes that you addressed during the meeting or that are no longer relevant or essential.
– Designate people who will tackle items that are not relevant to your team but might be relevant to others.
– Identify all needed steps and assignees for actionable items and turn them into Jira issues.
**This template has been inspired by the NNGroup and PHF.
Use this template