The second kickoff

Any project at our company that is still running in March gets a second kickoff. It started by accident in 2023, when Dina asked on a Monday morning what we were actually building, and four people gave four different answers. We had been at it for five months.

The first kickoff is a good meeting. Everyone is new to the idea, the brief is fresh, and the whiteboard has no history on it. By month five the brief is a document nobody has opened since October, the people have changed (Wren joined the billing work in January, Tomás left it in February), and the real scope lives in the heads of whoever sat in the most meetings. The project has drifted, and nobody chose the drift.

So in March we sit down again. We book 90 minutes, which is the same length as the first one, and we treat it as if the project were starting today with everything we have learned.

What we do in it

I run it from the meeting template with the agenda cut down to four parts.

1. Each person writes, alone and in silence for five minutes, what they think the project is for and who it is for. Then we read them out. This is the part that hurts, and the part that matters.
2. We list what we have shipped, what we have promised and not shipped, and what we have quietly dropped. The third list is nearly always the longest, and nobody has told the customers.
3. We decide what the next quarter is for, in one sentence, and write it on the door.
4. We name one thing we will stop doing.

The last item gets skipped if I do not insist on it. People are fine adding work. Taking work off the list feels like admitting a mistake, so I frame it as moving the work to a box labelled “next year”, which is less honest but more effective.¹

The 2024 example

The billing rebuild had its second kickoff on 12 March 2024. In the silent writing, five people described five different customers. Karim wrote “someone who is angry about a charge”; Ngozi wrote “a company with more than one entity”. Both were true. The first was where our tickets came from, and the second was where the engineering cost lay. We had been arguing for weeks about priorities without noticing that we were optimising for different people.

We ended with one sentence, “make the monthly invoice understandable to someone who did not set it up”, and the entity work moved to autumn. That decision took eleven minutes once the sentences were on the table. It had taken us the better part of two months without them.

What I have learned about running it

The facilitator should not be the project lead. I ran the billing one and had to bite my tongue through the reading-out, because my own answer was different from the others and I wanted to defend it. Since then I ask someone from another team to run it. Priya did the last one and was better at the silence than I am.

It also helps to hold it somewhere other than the usual room. We did the 2025 one in the library on the ground floor, with the door shut and phones in a box. Everyone wrote more.

I considered making it a quarterly habit. Dina argued against it, and I think she was right: the value of a second kickoff comes partly from its rarity. A meeting that happens every three months is a status meeting with a better name. The one in March is special because it comes after a long stretch of nobody asking, and by then people are ready to be asked.

Footnotes

1. It is less honest because most things in the “next year” box never come back. In 2024 we moved seven items there and revisited two. I have decided I can live with that, since the alternative was seven items nobody was working on but everyone believed were in progress. ↩