 Why is Elon Musk locked in a war room at Twitter? Imagine you're starting on a new UX project. It's messy, confusing, and it looks like chaos. You ask yourself, what the f*** is going on? If you want to know what Elon is doing, let's get into it. Hi, I'm Chris, a product designer. I work with some of the best teams at Google, AirAsia and Nike and many other smaller startups. The one thing that these teams know is how to set the course of a project from the beginning. Today, we're going to be breaking down project kickoffs. Working on a new project should be exciting, but instead we waste our time feeling anxious about the unknown. So often it feels like a project is off track even before it begins. Questions start to pile up. What are we doing? Who's responsible for what? Why are we doing this? Have we thought about a plan B if this falls through? Fast forward to a month or two later. You've underestimated the complexity of the projects and now you are nowhere near getting the answers that you need. You're confused and your team is getting nervous. Now, how do we untangle this mess? By getting your team on the same page through project kickoffs. A good project kickoff should bring together the team to create alignment, share goals, forecasts, milestones, and outline deliverable. And ultimately is to make unknowns known. So what's the purpose of the project kickoff? Do I really even need one? The answer is yes. When teams are left to their own devices without a well thought plan, meetings tend to run over and no one is cleared on the agreed direction. More often there will be one or two people dominating the whole meeting, interrupting each other, and everyone walks out of the meeting feeling like it was a waste of time. The project kickoff can help mitigate these problems and your team can use this opportunity to align on major ideas, discuss potential pain points, and decide on timelines and a lot more. With that in mind, here's how you structure your project kickoff. Let's break it down. Introduction. Tell the team why they are here and explain the intent of the project. Of course, you need to introduce yourself and add credibility as the facilitator. So here's an example of how I would introduce myself. Hey, I'm Chris, a product design consultant, and I'll be leading today's project kickoff as your facilitator. I've been designing experiences for SaaS products for the past eight years. I've worked at startups and Fortune 500 companies like Google, Nike, 21st Century Fox, and so on. So that's just a quick example of how you should introduce yourself as the facilitator. Then you want to do a round table. You want the team to get to know each other and their roles in the project. Sometimes it could be the first time people are working together so it's a nice little way to do an icebreaker. The most important thing to align on during this meeting is what you are working towards and why this work even matters. To do this, use expert interviews to share the context of the project. Discuss long-term goals to set the tone of the why. You can try and use how might we's to brainstorm, to turn challenges into opportunities. After clarifying why you're there and the high level goals and challenges, you want to dive into project details. Establish project roles and responsibilities. Solidify what's involved in the project and the owner of each task. You might want to dive into things like project scope, customer journey map, protopersonas, solution ideation, effort and impacts matrix, who's doing what through roles and responsibilities, and finally, deliverables. The next thing you want to do is talk about progress and milestones. Define your team's success metrics. It should include measurable outcomes that can serve as guidance for your team as you're working on this project. After that, dive into everything tools and methods. Put together a set of collaboration tools that you might be using for the project and explain how you'll be using them to communicate. Decide how you are going to work together. Examples of good project management tools could be Trello, Notion, Basecamp, etc. My preferred communication tool is Slack. And you've got to schedule weekly or regular check-ins. One thing that people forget to include in project kickoffs is risk and issue management. Even with the best planning, sometimes unexpected things pop up on a project. Communicate with your team on how you want to identify and respond to these issues together. Don't forget to leave time for questions. And finally, the summary. One of the most overlooked and important emails in any project is the follow-up. Send a summary to the project team and the kickoff attendees with the important documented decisions, action items, and of course, the owners assigned. So what does this have to do with Elon Musk? Well, we all know that he took over Twitter and has been locked in a war room since. This is basically your extended version of project kickoff. Using it to really figure out everything about Twitter. What key decisions were being made, everyone is aligned, and know what they're responsible for. Yes, that's right. The richest man in the world uses this framework and you should do the same. If you're interested in learning more about project kickoff with detailed guides and templates, check out the link in the description. Or you can hit the big red button for another play-by-play breakdown of UX frameworks. Bye.