The Illusion of Alignment. Or, Why Project Kickoffs Fail Without Shared Language.

Everyone joins the kickoff call excited. Caffeinated. Ready to hit the ground running. There’s a deck, maybe even a roadmap (or for the truly ambitious a sitemap). People nod. Slack channels spin up. A shared doc gets named. Your team walks away feeling like things are moving. And the truth of the matter is they are. But, perhaps, not in the same direction.

What looks like alignment on paper is often an illusion. When (not if) that illusion breaks it costs teams time, trust, and momentum. And you’re lucky if it breaks immediately. The longer the sprint cycle the more time until you realize there’s a problem at all.

The Problem Isn’t Process. It’s Premature Commitment.

Over the twenty years of my career I’d seen this happen often enough to build a remedy for it. We called it Sprint Zero.

Sprint Zero was a pre-development phase focused entirely on shared understanding. A design-led process to outline the product, the users, and how the product solved the problem our users faced. It was highly collaborative, and it was intentionally free from code. Why? Because once you start building, inertia sets in. Changing direction becomes expensive, both technically and emotionally.

So we created a space where change was not just allowed - it was expected. No idea was sacrosanct and all strong opinions were loosely held. It was a time when all egos were checked at the door.

The Client Who Changed His Mind (In the Best Way)

I once worked with a client who came in with an extremely specific vision. He’d already mapped out features, flows, and user types before our first call. In his mind, we were already halfway there. He just wanted us to get started. But I ran him through the Sprint Zero process anyway. That’s what processes are for - we do them no matter what to make sure everything is primed for success. We did wireframes, branding sprints, clickable prototypes, and finally working sessions with real users.

By the end of that two-week phase, we had a product that was indistinguishable from the original concept, but helped the users the founder had identified solve their problem in an incredibly elegant way.

It’s important to note that we didn’t push the client at all to this change. Because he was finally able to see and touch the product suddenly, the abstract ideas became tangible. He realized what mattered, what didn’t, and what needed to change. We avoided months of code revision and set everyone up so that the budget could be spent on polish instead of pivots.

Shared Documents Aren’t Shared Vision

The truth is, roadmaps and requirement docs don’t align teams. Shared language does. Shared experience does. You need a phase where you remove the pressure to ship and replace it with space to explore. And you need to come to the conclusions of a product’s roadmap together, not have it brought to you. That’s the real “skin in the game” that matters. For more on my thoughts about skin in the game and why I hate how the phrase is generally used check in next week.

Sprint Zero works because it slows you down. It forces everyone to articulate what they really want to solve for a user and when you come to the solution as a team that’s the best Sprint Zero outcome.

So next time you’re tempted to skip the preamble and jump into development, take a beat. Because what feels like progress today might just be a very expensive misunderstanding tomorrow.

Looking to align your team before development?

At Scholz Family Productions, I help organizations turn ideas into scalable, user-centered products. And every project starts with some variant of a Sprint Zero. From greenfield products ongoing creative strategy, I’m here to help you bring cross-functional teams into alignment. Let’s talk.