The Initiative Kickoff
A three-hour session in which your team agrees how the build ahead should improve your customers’ lives. We go from the obstacles in their current experience, to agreed UX goals for the build, with first metrics attached. The whole team starts designing and building with one version of success in mind.
Who this is for
The Initiative Kickoff is for teams that are about to commit development time to a specific project, product improvement, or feature, and want that build to pay off. For longer or more substantial projects, the UX Strategy Sprint is objectively a better fit, but the Kickoff works fine for small, well-contained product changes.
Projects often start with a description of what will be built: the functional requirements. In most cases, nothing in these requirements says how the lives of users or customers will improve as a result, or how this improvement will be measured. “Done” is defined by the mere fact of shipping.
But creating something valuable to the customer is impossible without setting measurable customer-centric UX goals at the very beginning, and without aligning the whole team around these goals. The Initiative Kickoff helps your team do exactly that.
How it works
A three-hour session, remote or in person. Your team makes the decisions; KSLV runs the process. The session runs on a UX framework that aligns the team and ties customer-centric goals to business objectives.
- Preparation call We agree what the session should cover and what the team brings: existing research, journey or story maps, support themes, whatever your company already knows about its customers.
- The session Your team works through three questions: what gets in your customers’ way today, what should change for the better as a result of what you are about to build, and how you will measure whether it does. You leave aligned on UX goals for the initiative, and with starting UX metrics the team will refine while building.
- The UX charter Within a week, KSLV consolidates the decisions into the UX charter: the document the team returns to whenever a debate starts during the build.
Kickoff participants
The core team working on the project, usually six to eight people: the product manager, the designers, and the engineers, together with your product and design leadership. Where the initiative touches the daily work of customers, the leads of customer-facing teams (support, sales, customer success) belong in the room as well; in most cases, they have unique insight into your customers.
You walk away with a UX charter your team can build against
The UX charter records everything the session settled: the problems worth solving, the UX goals with their metrics, and what was marked assumption rather than evidence. When a mid-build debate starts, the charter answers it instead of the loudest voice in the call.
And because the people who build the initiative decided its direction together, they start the work aligned on what success looks like.
What changes afterwards
- The build starts with a shared goal The goal describes an improvement in customer experience, rather than the mere fact of shipping. Now everyone is aligned on what “done” means for this project.
- Scoping decisions get easier The session settles which core value the first version must deliver and what the end result should look like. An MVP that delivers no customer value is not viable, whatever the acronym promises. Your team starts with something actually valuable and grows the value release by release.
- Success becomes measurable The team decides how to measure it before the first line of code is written.
If your situation is different
- The initiative ahead is bigger than one contained build, and the stakes are higher A major new capability, a new product area, a rebuild: work of that size deserves the full treatment. In the UX Strategy Sprint, your team creates a complete UX strategy for it over three sessions, from alignment around the current customer experience to a vision of the future one.
- You need a lasting customer-centric shift across your organisation In the UX Strategy Programme, the team steers the product’s evolution over the years ahead while gradually changing its ways of working towards a customer-centric approach.
Let’s talk
Thirty minutes is usually enough to know whether the Initiative Kickoff fits your situation. If it is the right step, we agree the practical details and go from there. Either way, you get a straight recommendation: the Kickoff, something bigger, or nothing at all.