Most web and marketing projects don't fail on execution. They fail on the things nobody said out loud at kickoff: the assumption everyone quietly treated as fact, the budget holder who never came to a meeting, the content nobody has time to write.
Sit through enough kickoffs and the pattern holds. It's rarely the craft that sinks a project. It's the silence around it.
These 12 cards get all of that on the table early. Each one is a place to write down what we know, what we're assuming, and what could quietly blow up if nobody says it out loud.
You don't need another template. You need the awkward questions asked out loud, early, while they're still cheap.
Every card answers the same five questions: what we know, what we're assuming, what we don't know, how risky that feels (low, medium or high), and who's going to check it. The last one matters most. If nobody owns the validation, that's your first red flag, and usually the most useful one in the deck.
You're not filling out all 12 cards before kickoff. Pre-fill what you know, walk the deck together in one 90-minute session, flag the unknowns, give each one an owner, then sequence the work by risk instead of by whatever everyone's most excited about.
If you can't explain how the company actually makes money, nothing else on the cards matters much. Start here.
Forget personas for a minute. What you want on this card is who actually buys, who talks them into it, and who can quietly kill the deal.
This is where projects get wobbly, and where the wobble usually stays hidden until launch.
If nobody agrees on what success looks like before you start, scope creep will happily decide for you.
Every project runs on beliefs dressed up as facts. This card makes them introduce themselves.
Where agencies inherit other people's tech debt. Ask now, not in month two.
Content is what kills timelines, not the build. It's always "coming" right up until it isn't.
Agencies love to pretend office politics isn't their problem. It is. Find out who actually decides before the deciding starts.
Everyone says yes to everything and then quietly drowns. This card is where that gets named before it happens.
Write down everything that could break this project that lives outside your control, and what you'll do when it does.
The site launches. Then what? If nothing changes in anyone's day to day, it's worth asking why you're doing it.
Nobody wants to talk about money early, which is exactly why you talk about it early.
If something is both uncertain and expensive to get wrong, it goes in an early sprint. If it's neither, it can wait.
When you run the same deck on every project, patterns start showing up fast. Project managers stop firefighting. Sales stops overselling. Scope creep drops, margins follow. And the quiet win is the real one: clients start trusting you more, because you're asking better questions than anyone else in the room.
Run it with a facilitator: A 90-minute session with a fresh pair of eyes surfaces what the team is too close to see. Book a chat and we'll pressure-test your cards together.
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