Planning for the Next Version

We have had a couple of offsite meetings in the past two weeks to prepare for the next version of our products. The documentation team met at the Seattle Public Library, which I had not been to since it was rebuilt. The product team met at a conference center on the Microsoft campus.
We spent two days before the documentation team meeting reading information from the product team about the changes they wanted to make. It's very early in the planning process, so although the product team members have a good idea about the major focus of the product, they don't have many details. But we just wanted to come up with a general idea of how we will organize the docs and our doc planning, so understanding the major focus was good enough.
The product team meeting was to work out some of the details for the major areas that are under consideration. I'm glad the product team invited us, that is, the documentation team—we're in separate organizations that work together on products, so sometimes the product teams do not include the writers in early planning. It really helps us to think in advance about how to plan our docs, though.
Did we really need to have offsite meetings this early in the product cycle? Maybe not, at least as far as designing our products goes. We probably would have come to very similar decisions as we went about our usual set of meetings and the normal communication. But the offsite meetings accomplished the main goal that was presented by the product team manager—to get everyone involved at the outset, and to generate an early vision that we can keep in mind. That's easier to do in a central planning effort than it is over e-mail and in individual feature team meetings.