🚧 (WIP) Quiz: Build your customized planning power-up plan
A) Timeframe
How often does your team run official planning cycles? How long does each planning each cycle last?
Gives you a % score
<=10% — You win a award 🥇
Teach: Thou shalt not plan more than 10%.
How to get to <10%:
Fix dependency tracking → Dependency bullpen Do pre-work → Sports Center
D) Accountability protocols
Teach: the goal of planning is to actually execute. The worst thing you could do is spend a lot of time planning, then forget about your plans. To prevent this, we’ve learned it’s best to work backwards from your accountability protocol. Then, design your planning algorithm to match.
Which accountability protocol do you currently use?
Let’s build your new accountability protocol. Choose which rituals you want to include:
B) Algorithm
Select which steps of the planning process you currently do:
Select which tools you currently use to plan
Reflection
Do you currently include a reflection period before you start planning? Yes → Great, you’re doing M-shaped planning. This is what we recommend. No → You’re doing W-shaped planning. We recommend always including a short reflection period (turning the W upside down into an M). Do you want to include a reflection period in your new planning algorithm? Yes → Great. We’ll include it. The goal of reflection phase is to look backward on the past period and understand what worked well. Start by grading all your previous OKRs and/or Jira epics, then do an asynch retro using a two-way doc. No → Okay, no problem. We’ll exclude it. You’ll keep W-shaped planning.
Top down guidance
Do executives currently share top-down guidance with the team near the beginning of the planning process? Yes → How do you share that? We recommend adding top down guidance to your planning algorithm. Want to add it?
Bottom up planning
Do you have a place where anyone across the team can add an idea? Yes → Drop in link, we’ll embed it into Coda Does it feel like individuals are battling to “win” planning by getting their ideas prioritized? No → That’s great. How do you encourage this? (free-form answer) We’ve seen this tends to happen over time in even the best orgs. Add $100 voting to prevent this mindset. Do you want to try it? Do teams struggle to think big enough? Do folks get stuck within the confines of their own teams and ideas? No, we’re pretty good at this → Amazing! How do you encourage this? (free-form answer). For teams that do struggle with this, we recommend Airbnb’s 11-star experience. Do you want to add it into your planning algorithm for future reference? Yes, we struggle with this → Airbnb’s 11 star experience. Do you use specific prioritization frameworks? For more customer empathy → Uber’s Employee driving. Within Coda we could set up a rotation for everyone on the team to join sales calls, help with support tickets, etc.
Top down: Integration
How do you handle dependencies?
TKTK
Botton up: Buy in
C) Outputs
What’s your current final output of planning?
A single picture (aspirational tweet, chart, screenshot, mock, etc.)
Which outputs would you like to your new planning system to include?
A single picture (aspirational tweet, chart, screenshot, mock, etc.)
Teach: We believe planning outputs that are exhaustive are exhausting. The goal of the output isn’t to capture every single piece of work (because let’s be honest, detailed plans always change!). Rather, it’s to ensure everyone’s work is aligned.
