Project Kickoff Doc

Most kickoff docs are either too vague to anchor anything ("deliver value to stakeholders") or so heavy nobody reads them past page one. This skill writes the version in the middle — short enough to use, specific enough to prevent the silent drift that turns a six-month project into a ten-month one. The structure is fixed and the most important section is the one most kickoffs skip: Out of Scope, written explicitly, with the things people will definitely ask about already named and excluded.

The scope discipline is what makes it work. The skill won't let you proceed with vague success criteria — "improve user experience" gets rejected because it's not binary. "Reduce support tickets by 25%" passes. Same with milestones — they have to be verifiable states of the world ("design approved and dev-ready"), not tasks ("complete design review"). The difference matters: a state is something anyone can confirm; a task is something only the doer knows about.

DACI is enforced with one rule that breaks the most committees: one approver per decision, ever. Two approvers equals zero approvers. The Driver does the work, the Approver has final say (single name), Contributors give input, the Informed get told. It's pedantic on purpose — the difference between a project that ships and one that stalls in consensus is usually a missing name in the A column. The skill also builds a change-request process into the doc itself, because scope will change, and the question is whether you have a process for it or whether scope creeps silently until you're 8 weeks behind.

Adaptations exist for the situations where the full doc is overkill or wrong. Solo side projects collapse DACI (you're all four) but keep the scope wall, because solopreneurs scope-creep themselves harder than any committee. Exploratory projects redefine milestones as learning milestones with a hard end date — exploration without a deadline becomes permanent research. For the 30-second version, the 5-Minute Mode gives you done means / not doing / by when / who decides / first action — five lines, fits in a Slack message, prevents the worst failures even when there's no time for the full doc.