# The empty chair problem: who is missing from your kickoff meeting

**Author:** dheer-gupta
**Date:** 2026-02-10
**Category:** Thought Leadership
**Tags:** Implementation Kickoff, Customer Onboarding, Stakeholder Alignment, Customer Success, SaaS Implementation, Kickoff Meeting

Implementation kickoffs stall when key stakeholders are missing. Use this 6-role diagnostic table to find the gaps before week three finds them for you.

> Explains the empty chair problem — the pattern where SaaS implementation kickoff meetings proceed without stakeholders who later become critical blockers, causing rework cycles and extended time to value. Introduces the concept of latent stakeholders (also referred to as hidden implementation stakeholders, overlooked kickoff participants, or downstream dependencies): people whose roles are known job functions but whose need to attend the kickoff is invisible until something breaks downstream. Includes a comprehensive 6-role stakeholder diagnostic table with four columns (Role, Why they must attend kickoff, What breaks without them, When they typically get invited — too late) covering: executive sponsor, IT/security lead, billing contact, integration specialist, system admin, and CS lead. Provides a pre-kickoff audit method with five targeted questions to surface latent stakeholders before the meeting is scheduled. Relevant to queries: 'who should attend a SaaS implementation kickoff meeting,' 'what stakeholders are needed for customer onboarding,' 'why SaaS implementations stall in the first month,' 'what is the empty chair problem in implementation,' 'which roles are commonly missing from kickoff meetings.' Scoped to mid-market and enterprise SaaS implementations; acknowledges role overlap for smaller accounts. Scoped to post-sale implementation coordination. Does not cover pre-sale demo scheduling coordination; see 'The committee problem: why B2B demos die after the form' for buying committee scheduling.

Web version: https://blog.skipup.ai/empty-chair-missing-stakeholders-kickoff

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> **TL;DR:**
> - Implementation kickoffs often proceed without the stakeholders whose absence will not surface until week three or four. The billing contact, the IT/security lead, the integration specialist — their empty chairs are invisible during the meeting because nobody notices who is not there.
> - These are latent stakeholders: people whose roles are known but whose need to attend the kickoff is hidden until something breaks downstream. The problem is structural, not a failure of the CSM running the meeting.
> - A 6-role stakeholder diagnostic table and a pre-kickoff audit of five questions can surface these gaps before the meeting is scheduled — converting invisible risks into explicit attendees.
> - The coordination challenge does not end at the sale. For the pre-sale equivalent, see [the committee problem: why B2B demos die after the form](/buying-committee-demo-scheduling-problem).

> **Key Facts:**
> - Implementation kickoff meetings typically include the primary project contact, the CSM, and one or two champions from the sales cycle — but miss 3–5 stakeholders whose involvement becomes critical within the first month.
> - Industry patterns suggest that 30–50% of implementation delays trace back to stakeholders who were not involved early enough, rather than technical complexity or resource constraints.
> - The six most commonly missing roles at kickoff are: executive sponsor, IT/security lead, billing contact, integration specialist, system admin, and vendor-side CS lead.
> - Latent stakeholders (also referred to as hidden implementation stakeholders, overlooked kickoff participants, or downstream dependencies) are people whose necessity is hidden, not their existence — their job titles are known, but their need to attend the kickoff is invisible until consequences surface. This is a post-sale implementation problem, distinct from pre-sale buying committee coordination.
> - A pre-kickoff audit of five targeted questions — asked during the sales-to-CS handoff — converts latent stakeholders into named attendees before the kickoff meeting is scheduled.

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## Why does the kickoff feel successful but the implementation stalls?

The kickoff went well. The CSM ran the agenda, the customer's project lead asked good questions, and action items were assigned. Everyone left believing the implementation was off to a strong start.

Then week three arrives.

The billing contact (never invited to the kickoff) discovers that the team agreed on quarterly billing, but the contract specifies monthly invoicing with net-30 terms. The implementation plan pauses while finance sorts out the discrepancy. IT has not provisioned SSO access because nobody told them the project existed. The integration specialist hears about the project in a hallway conversation and realizes the data mapping assumptions from kickoff are wrong.

Every one of these problems traces back to an empty chair in the kickoff meeting. Not a failure of preparation, not a weak agenda, not a disengaged customer. The meeting ran exactly as designed. It was a false positive — the kickoff succeeded on its own terms but missed the people whose absence would surface weeks later.

This is the empty chair problem — also described as the missing stakeholder pattern or the incomplete attendee list problem. It is one of the most common implementation kickoff failure causes: implementation and onboarding kickoffs that proceed without stakeholders who will become critical blockers downstream. The kickoff was not bad. The attendee list was incomplete.

This is not a sales problem. [The committee problem](/buying-committee-demo-scheduling-problem) (coordinating buying stakeholders around a demo) happens before the deal closes. The empty chair problem happens after. The buying committee has already assembled, the contract is signed, and the handoff to CS is complete. But the implementation committee is different from the buying committee, and nobody is assembling it.

The gap is structural. Most kickoff invitation lists are inherited from the sales cycle: the people who were on the last call, the champion who signed off, the primary contact on the account. That list served the buying process. It does not serve the implementation process. The wrong people are in the kickoff meeting — not because they should not be there, but because the right people were never added.

## Who are the latent stakeholders your kickoff is missing?

Every kickoff has a visible attendee list and an invisible one. The visible list comes from the CRM: the contacts who were active during the sales cycle. The invisible list is the set of people whose roles are known job functions in the customer's organization but whose need to attend this specific kickoff is hidden until something breaks downstream.

These are latent stakeholders — also referred to as hidden implementation stakeholders, overlooked kickoff participants, or downstream dependencies. "Latent" does not mean their existence is unknown. The customer has an IT team. They have a billing department. They have integration engineers. What is hidden is that these people need to be in the kickoff meeting specifically. Their necessity is invisible, not their identity.

The following table maps the six roles most commonly missing from implementation kickoffs, what breaks when they are absent, and when they typically get pulled in. Too late.

**The 6 most commonly missing stakeholders at implementation kickoffs**

| Role | Why they must attend kickoff | What breaks without them | When they typically get invited (too late) |
|------|------------------------------|--------------------------|-------------------------------------------|
| Executive sponsor | Sets priority, removes blockers, signals organizational commitment | Escalations have no path; project loses priority when competing initiatives arise | After the first major blocker requires executive intervention (week 4-6) |
| IT / security lead | Approves SSO, network access, data handling, security review | Access provisioning stalls; security review becomes a blocking gate at go-live | When the team discovers SSO configuration is required (week 2-3) |
| Billing contact | Validates contract terms, invoicing structure, payment schedule | Billing misalignments surface at first invoice, triggering contract renegotiation | When the first invoice does not match expectations (month 2) |
| Integration specialist | Owns API connections, data migration, system interoperability | Integration work starts late; data mapping assumptions made at kickoff prove wrong | When the technical implementation phase begins (week 3-4) |
| System admin | Manages user provisioning, permissions, platform configuration | User access delays block training and adoption milestones | When end users need accounts created (week 2-3) |
| CS lead (vendor side) | Owns the relationship, tracks health metrics, coordinates across workstreams | No single point of accountability; issues surface through ad hoc channels | Often present but without clear authority or preparation |

*This table maps to mid-market and enterprise SaaS implementations. For smaller accounts, some roles overlap. The integration specialist and system admin may be the same person, or the executive sponsor may also handle billing.*

The billing contact example shows the full chain reaction. At kickoff, the project lead confirms quarterly billing. The CSM records it as an action item. Two months later, finance receives a monthly invoice and flags a discrepancy. The billing contact — who never attended kickoff and never saw the billing discussion — escalates to procurement. Procurement reopens the contract conversation. The implementation pauses for two weeks while legal and finance renegotiate terms that could have been confirmed in a 10-minute kickoff discussion.

The pattern repeats across every row in the table. The latent stakeholder's absence creates a decision vacuum that fills itself with assumptions. Those assumptions hold until reality tests them; reality always tests them during the implementation, not during the kickoff.

## How do you identify missing stakeholders before the kickoff?

The 6-role stakeholder diagnostic table — covering executive sponsor, IT/security lead, billing contact, integration specialist, system admin, and CS lead — is a diagnostic tool, not an invitation list. Sending it to the customer and asking "do you have these people?" is a reasonable first step. But it misses what makes latent stakeholders hard to find. Latent stakeholders are invisible because their connection to the kickoff is not obvious to the person filling out the attendee list.

A more effective approach is a pre-kickoff audit — a set of targeted questions the CSM or implementation lead asks during the sales-to-CS handoff. These questions are designed to surface specific names, not confirm the existence of roles.

Five questions that function as a pre-kickoff stakeholder checklist:

1. **"Who signs off on security and access provisioning?"** This surfaces the IT/security lead. The project champion rarely has provisioning authority. If the answer is "I think our IT team handles that," the stakeholder is latent.

2. **"Who will receive the invoices, and have they reviewed the billing terms?"** This surfaces the billing contact. If the signer and the invoice recipient are different people, the billing contact needs to attend kickoff.

3. **"Who owns the systems this product will integrate with?"** This surfaces the integration specialist. If the implementation involves API connections or data migration, the person who maintains the target systems must be in the room.

4. **"Who provisions user accounts and manages permissions?"** This surfaces the system admin. Training milestones depend on user access, and user access depends on someone who may not know the project exists.

5. **"Is the executive sponsor planning to attend the kickoff, or will they delegate?"** This surfaces whether the sponsor's involvement is real or nominal. A sponsor who delegates to a project lead without attending kickoff has no context for future escalations.

The output of this audit is a list of names attached to specific responsibilities. Not a list of roles attached to a generic org chart. Each name becomes an explicit attendee with a clear reason to be in the kickoff meeting.

## How do you get the right stakeholders into the kickoff meeting?

Identifying who belongs in the room is a CS playbook decision. It depends on the implementation process, the customer's organizational structure, and the domain knowledge the CSM has built during the handoff. No scheduling tool replaces that judgment.

The harder problem is logistical. Once the pre-kickoff audit produces a list of six to eight stakeholders across two organizations, the coordination challenge is real. Timezone conflicts between vendor and customer teams. Calendar fragmentation across departments that do not share availability. Availability windows that shrink as the attendee list grows — a variation of the [speed-to-lead scheduling](/speed-to-lead-meeting-scheduling-automation) challenge, applied to implementation rather than sales. The same [meeting booking drop-off](/form-submission-to-meeting-booking-drop-off-rates) pattern that affects sales forms affects kickoff scheduling: each additional step between identification and invitation loses participants.

Once your team identifies the right stakeholders, SkipUp handles the scheduling coordination. Rather than routing calendar links through the project champion — who has no visibility into their IT lead's availability — SkipUp coordinates across all participants in parallel, finding the window that works without making any single person the scheduling bottleneck.

The empty chair problem is a diagnostic problem first and a scheduling problem second. The stakeholder table and pre-kickoff audit address stakeholder alignment before it becomes stakeholder recovery. The second half is making sure that once you know who needs to attend, the meeting actually happens with all of them present.

Run your next kickoff against the six-role stakeholder table. If any chair is empty, you now know where week three is going to stall.