Every significant feature should have a formal kick-start meeting. Meeting must include 1-2 developers that will implement the feature, QA engineer, product owner. Other people can join to participate/listen if they want.
Meeting is announced in Slack (#kickstarts channel). It is desirable to plan it with at least one day notice, so people can plan accordingly and join.
Feature specification should be ready before the meeting and some async communication should already take place before the meeting. Kickstart meeting is a sync communication to discover missing requirements, briefly discuss technical challenges and nail some plans. In general, these areas should be discussed:
What functional requirements are missing? What is not clear enough? Can we reduce feature scope and move some requirements into future features?
Do we have technical limitations? How they affect functional requirements? Do we have a clear path of technical implementation?
Can we provide rough estimates? Do we need a Spike to clarify things?
All participants are aligned and understand why the feature is important, and how it should work.
List of missing requirements that should be added
List of functional spec corrections (in most cases they are added during the meeting)
Feature planned dates (or a decision to do a Spike)
Sometimes we skip Kickstart meetings… Not good.