More than 5 years after the passage of the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), California school districts continue to develop and refine strategies to act on the opportunities and expectations associated with the state's school finance system. A new project called the LCFF Test Kitchen has enabled three school districts to make progress by leveraging the power of user-centered design. LCFF fundamentally altered the way the state allocates resources to school districts and the expectations for how districts should report on the use of those resources. As the California education community began navigating this new territory, the Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP) became the vehicle through which a range of policymakers, advocates, and others sought to achieve their goals for the new policy. However, the process suffered from many of the flaws of traditional approaches to policymaking, and in trying to serve many interests, the resulting LCAP template served none well. Beginning in 2017, a project known as the LCFF Test Kitchen brought together a set of partners and three school district design teams to address the policy development and implementation process in a new way. This brief describes progress in Year 1 of the LCFF Test Kitchen and the solutions it has generated. [Azusa USD, Elk Grove USD, and Oceanside USD are the three local school district contributing partners to this project.]