Project kickoff deck templates

What these designs are for

Use this for the first meeting of a project, where scope, decisions, phases and people all have to be agreed in one sitting. These layouts give the decision structure a real diagram rather than a bullet list, and give the team slide enough room to name who does what.

Agenda: set the order before the argument

Twelve agenda layouts are available and a kickoff usually needs four to six sections. The two by two grid suits a 45 minute meeting with four topics; the coloured bar layout holds six without crowding. Because every agenda layout has a fixed item count, the honest move is to cut the agenda to the layout rather than squeeze a seventh item into a six bar design where it will not fit.

Tree: ten layouts for who decides what

The tree role holds ten templates, split between organisational charts and decision structures. The org chart takes a root and two to five direct reports, with grandchildren under each, rendered three levels deep: the root, up to six items and up to four children under each. The binary and three path layouts are the ones to use for a decision rule, because they show the branches and the consequence of each rather than implying a hierarchy that does not exist.

Timeline: phases, and what the Gantt will not do

Eighteen timeline layouts exist and four are Gantt charts with different caps: six tasks over five months on the phase rollup, eight over four quarters on the quarterly roadmap, ten over six sprints on the sprint plan and twelve over five quarters on the swim lane. None of them draws dependencies, because a task is a name, a start, an end and an optional group. If the point of the slide is that B cannot start until A finishes, say so in the label or use the flowchart instead.

Profile: ten layouts for the team slide

The profile role has ten templates: a single person with a bio, a portrait with three section cards, a headshot with a stats strip, a detail grid, an editorial two person split, a founders and advisors set, a polaroid grid, a team row with a client logo strip, a team grid with a stats banner and a text only directory. For a kickoff the directory grid is usually right, because it names everyone without needing ten headshots, and it is the one pictured here: the rest are filled with an invented founder biography in the library's sample text. Portrait photographs go in image slots, and automatic image generation skips any slot marked as a profile or a logo, so faces are uploads rather than inventions.

What the thumbnails are

The two agenda cards are slides from example decks published here; the other cards show a layout drawn by the template library with its own placeholder text, the same rendering the public gallery serves. The roles, questions and dates inside the pictures are invented rather than a real project. Layouts whose sample text invents a person or a customer are named in the prose instead of being shown.

How long a kickoff deck runs

The kickoff deck published here is 9 slides, the onboarding deck that follows the same pattern is 11 and the RFP response deck, which does the same work for a bid, is 12. Nine is a good target for a first meeting: cover, agenda, scope, decisions, phases, team, risks, next steps and a close. The closing role has eleven layouts and this page does not list them, because they are shown in full on the pitch, sales and company profile pages.

Finished examples

• Project kickoff deck

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