> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.kowalah.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Your onboarding journey

> The guided first-run experience: sketch your organization, capture your first process, and work through the five journey steps from Map to Deliver.

When your organization is new to Kowalah, you do not land in the full platform on day one. You land on a **journey home** at **Getting started**, which walks you through building the foundation everything else depends on: a map of how your business actually works.

The platform reveals itself as you go. Sections you have no use for yet stay out of the way, and appear as you reach the point of needing them.

<Note>
  The journey is for organization admins and core team members, the people setting Kowalah up. Everyone else lands on their normal home. If your organization has been with Kowalah for a while, you are already past the journey and go straight to your [dashboard](/platform/overview).
</Note>

## The five steps

Your journey home shows a tracker with five steps. One of them is always the current step, with a single clear action attached to it.

<Steps>
  <Step title="Map">
    Chart your organization and the processes that matter most. This becomes the backbone of your AI operating model.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Prioritise">
    Review the gap between how each process runs today and where AI could take it. That gap is your backlog.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Discover">
    Run a [discovery](/platform/discoveries) into a team or process to gather ideas from the people closest to the work.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Decide">
    Score the [opportunities](/platform/opportunities) your discoveries surfaced, and pick the ones worth pursuing.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Deliver">
    Your prioritised opportunities become real work, tracked in your workspace.
  </Step>
</Steps>

Progress only ever moves forward. Completing something advances your organization to the next stage, and nothing you do later moves it back.

Alongside the tracker sits a short checklist for the run-up to your [Vision Map Workshop](/get-started/how-it-works): sketch your organization structure, capture your key processes and their AI targets, invite your leadership team, and confirm the workshop date.

<Tip>
  If your organization has the [Kowalah Agent](/integrations/agent/overview) connected to Slack, Teams, or Google Chat, the journey home points it out. Working through the early steps in conversation with the agent is often faster than filling in forms.
</Tip>

## Sketching your organization

The Map step opens a guided flow called **Sketch your organisation**. Rather than handing you a blank canvas, it asks how your business is shaped and builds the first layer of your map from your answers.

<Steps>
  <Step title="Choose how your business is organized">
    Pick the model that fits best:

    | Model                           | When it fits                                                         |
    | ------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------- |
    | **By function**                 | One team per capability: Sales, Finance, Operations, and so on.      |
    | **By business unit or product** | Distinct units or product lines, often with central shared services. |
    | **By region or geography**      | Regions or countries, sometimes with central functions.              |
    | **A mix**                       | Divisions or units plus central shared services.                     |
  </Step>

  <Step title="Name the main parts">
    You are asked for the top level only, your functions, units, regions, or divisions. The functional model comes pre-filled with common suggestions you can edit or remove.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Add central shared services">
    If you picked a non-functional model, you get an optional pass for the central teams that serve everyone, such as Finance, HR, or IT. Anything you have already named is not duplicated.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Land in the map">
    The flow creates those units under your company and drops you into the visual editor to refine them.
  </Step>
</Steps>

<Note>
  This step captures **structure only**. Nesting teams inside teams, and the detail underneath each unit, is refined afterwards in the editor and in your workshop. Getting the top level roughly right is enough to move on.
</Note>

## Finding your feet on the map

The first time you land on your operating model, a short orientation strip explains what you are looking at in plain language: your units run on processes, Kowalah maps where AI can take some of the load, and the gap between how a process runs today and where it could get to is the opportunity. That gap is what the **% AI** figure on each card is tracking.

You can dismiss the strip once it has served its purpose, and it stays dismissed.

## Adding your first process

Next to the orientation is a guided way to add your first process without learning the full editor:

1. Pick the unit that owns the work.
2. Name the process and a few of its steps. Keep it coarse.
3. For the first step, set a first instinct on how it runs **today** and what it **could become**.

That is enough to complete the Map step and move your journey on, because a process with a target disposition is the smallest useful thing the rest of the platform can act on.

<Tip>
  The guided version deliberately does not offer **AI-autonomous** as a target. Full autonomy needs an escalation trigger and a quality check to be safe, and that conversation belongs in your Vision Map Workshop rather than a first-run form. See [processes and steps](/platform/operating-model/processes-and-steps) for what a complete step looks like.
</Tip>

## How the platform opens up

The sidebar grows with you, so you are never looking at a queue that cannot have anything in it yet.

| Stage                   | What becomes available                                                                                                 |
| ----------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Welcome and mapping** | Your operating model, settings, and AI chat.                                                                           |
| **Discovery**           | Discoveries and opportunities appear, once you have something worth gathering ideas about.                             |
| **Delivering**          | Projects, deliverables, tasks, and Expert Requests appear, and Home becomes your full [dashboard](/platform/overview). |

Reaching the delivering stage is the end of the journey. Getting started stops being your landing page, and the AI adoption cockpit takes over.

## What's next

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Operating Model" icon="map" href="/platform/operating-model/overview">
    The full picture of how your company works and where AI is landing
  </Card>

  <Card title="Processes and steps" icon="workflow" href="/platform/operating-model/processes-and-steps">
    Dispositions, acceptance criteria, quality checks, and KPIs
  </Card>

  <Card title="Invite your team" icon="users" href="/get-started/invite-your-team">
    Bring your leadership team in before the workshop
  </Card>

  <Card title="Platform overview" icon="layout-dashboard" href="/platform/overview">
    Where you land once the journey is done
  </Card>
</CardGroup>