How to use this checklist
Use each box to prompt discussion or reflection, not as a task to complete. The sub-points should only guide your judgement rather than define your actions.
Before you travel
Focus: improve the quality of information you will receive.
- Your customer may not be your end user. Ensure both shape your design.
- Who uses the solution day to day?
- Who influences adoption, payment, permission, or legitimacy?
- Who might lose income, status, or control if this succeeds?
- Make your assumptions explicit
- What problem do you believe you are responding to, and for whom?
- What are you assuming about behaviour, trust, time, risk, or payment?
- Which assumptions would seriously damage the project if wrong?
- Design how you will listen
- How will people safely disagree or raise concerns?
- Who will not be present, and how does that shape what you hear?
- How will you make sure what you hear is recorded and compared across meetings?
- Clarify where decisions can change
- Which design, delivery, pricing, or partnership arrangements could change as a result of this trip?
- Who in your organisation has the authority to act on what you learn?
After you return
Focus: turn what you have learned into concrete decisions.
- Look for gaps between what people say and what they do
- Where did behaviour differ from what people said?
- Where did you notice silence, hesitation, or deflection?
- What does this suggest about underlying risks or limits?
- Update your view of who actually mattered during the trip
- Who mattered more than expected?
- Who was missing but would clearly shape outcomes or decisions?
- How does this change when thinking about scale, not just pilots?
- Integrate what you learned into decisions
- What will you change as a result of this trip, and why?
- What will not change, and why?
- Which original assumptions still hold, and which do not?
- Anticipate downstream effects
- Who benefits immediately, and who later?
- Who carries any new burden, cost, or risk?
- What expectations may now exist because of your presence?
- Follow up clearly and explicitly
- What will you communicate back, to whom, and when?
- What will you say if decisions are delayed or uncertain?
- How will you avoid silence being interpreted as disengagement?
Reminder. Engagement is useful when it changes how decisions are made, not just when it reassures you about your plans.
© The 80:20 Pathway