Most program kickoffs are performed rather than run. People show up, someone reads slides, everyone nods, and two weeks later the disagreements the kickoff was supposed to prevent are still there, just harder to surface.
The thing a kickoff has to produce is shared understanding of three things: what success looks like, who owns what, and what the first decision point is. Everything else is secondary. If the room leaves aligned on those three, the kickoff worked.
I run the scope conversation first, before the timeline, before anything else. Every kickoff I have ever attended that started with the Gantt chart ended with people arguing about scope three weeks in. If you cannot agree on what the program is, the dates are fiction.
Ownership is harder than it looks. Teams will nod at a RACI and then operate as if it doesn't exist. I name owners out loud in the room and ask each person to confirm. Public confirmation changes the dynamic in a way that a spreadsheet column does not.
The kickoff should end with a single next action and a date, not a list of follow-ups. One concrete thing, one owner, one date. That is the test of whether the kickoff was real or ceremonial.