Start your product initiatives with a kick-off document — here is my template

The moment you leave a meeting room the divergence from the plan you have all just agreed will immediately begin. I’ve experienced it myself many times. And as a Product Manager, there is nothing more potentially dangerous than stakeholders having a different understanding of what is going to be built than you do.

This is why I believe that most product initiatives should start with a kick-off document. And I will explain why and how this can help you prevent problems before they arise.

There are a few reasons I find writing kick-off documents so valuable:

1. Stakeholder alignment. Sharing an initiative in long-form writing, backed up with user insight and informed with data, is the best way to crystallise a situation and avoid the HiPPO effect. If you don’t know what that stands for, it refers to the highest-paid-persons-opinion. The moment you leave things subjective and perhaps only express your position vocally, you leave yourself to be overruled. We can all suffer from false-consensus bias and writing things down is a powerful way to align stakeholders around the problem and solution space, rather than assuming that everyone is thinking the same as you. It also helps you lead the conversation with data and user insights, by providing as much grounding in “what we think we know” versus “what we don’t know but need to find out”. It serves to provide concrete steps forward.
2. Facts versus opinions. One of my favourite product management principles is “you are not the user”. The benefit of a kick-off document is to ground a product initiative around as much objective truth as possible and highlight clearly what is a fact, an insight (either from a user, data, or market intelligence) or a hypothesis that needs to be validated.
3. It helps provide a platform to discuss what success looks like before kicking off a project. This is the best way to avoid outcome bias where you equate the quality of a decision or process based on the quality of the outcome.

You will need different sections that elaborate on topics that are contextually relevant for your product initiative. Nonetheless, in the various kick-off documents I’ve written, they have all contained the following sections: