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CAMPAIGN KICKOFF AND RETRO QUESTIONS
Kickoffs fail when everyone assumes the brief was read. Retros fail when they turn into blame. Choose the meeting, the campaign type and the length, and get a timed question pack the room can actually run.
How it works
- Choose kickoff, retro, or both.
- Pick the campaign type and how long the meeting is.
- Tick who is in the room, so the questions land on people who can answer them.
- Generate the pack, name a note taker before you start, and run it as written the first time.
Your question pack will appear here.
This runs the meeting around the brief. It does not replace the brief itself, so write that with the universal brief template first. If the meeting you are preparing for is with an agency about the relationship rather than about one campaign, use the quarterly review agenda.
A meeting aid. Nothing you enter is sent anywhere or stored.
If you would rather have this done with you than to you, this is the work I do. See services
The questions that feel unnecessary
The ones people want to skip are the ones that were assumed: what number means this worked, who are we willing to disappoint, and what happens in the CRM the moment somebody converts. Assumptions are cheap to surface in a kickoff and expensive to discover in week six, which is the entire argument for asking all of them out loud even when the room is impatient.
A retro is not a post-mortem
The difference is that a retro produces one experiment and a written decision, and a post-mortem produces a feeling. Pull the numbers before the meeting, read the brief out loud, and keep the keep, kill and change list short enough that somebody could act on it on Monday. The brief itself is a separate document: write that with the universal brief template.
COMMON QUESTIONS
Is this the universal brief?
No. The brief defines the work. This runs the meeting around it, and assumes a brief exists or is about to.
Can I use it for an agency review?
Use the quarterly review agenda for the relationship. This one is for a single campaign kickoff or retro.
What if the campaign is still running?
Run the kickoff questions as a checkpoint. Several of them, particularly the ones about what you will not do, are more useful mid-flight than they look.
How long should a retro be?
Forty-five minutes with the numbers pulled in advance. An hour if the campaign was large or the room is new to running them.