The Ultimate Coda Handbook for Planning & OKRs

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The Ultimate Coda Handbook for Planning & OKRs

The Ultimate Coda Handbook for Planning & OKRs

Optimize the process

How planning output is only as good as the process by which you create it.

When I speak with company leaders, I frequently hear complaints about their planning process: it takes too much work, drags on for too long, and the outcome doesn’t justify the slog. This combination of long and ineffectiveness can be extremely frustrating—everyone wants more time to drive execution rather than be bogged down in unhelpful planning.

In many companies, the time spent planning creeps up year after year, and it is not uncommon that planning for next year kicks off immediately after planning for the current year has wrapped up. This leads to the unfortunate situation of being stuck between the old, soon-to-be-outdated plan and the new, not-yet-finished plan. And as any effective leader knows, time spent planning can’t be spend on execution.

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The golden rule of planning.

The success of planning is based on the execution that follows. My golden rule: you should spend only 10% of your time planning, leaving 90% of your time for execution. This ratio does not imply that planning is not valuable, but that execution is where the majority of value gets created.

Thou shalt spend no more than 10% of your time planning.

Aiming to achieve this rule forces a highly efficient planning process. Too often, teams can become bogged down in the details, endlessly debating the "perfect" approach. This rule encourages focus on high-impact activities and leaves room for adjustments as projects evolve. To make 10% planning work, you’ll be forced to adopt other best practices around data collection, customer feedback, and more. For example, instead of only collecting feature requests and evaluating top issues during planning, you’ll need to continuously gather this throughout the year (which has other advantages besides saving planning time).

At Coda, the first two weeks of every quarter used to be dedicated to planning—and there were some requests to add a third week. Instead, I went the other direction and reduced planning down to a single week. Some worried that this was an insufficient amount of time and would result in lower quality plans. It turns out the opposite was true. The shorter duration forced everyone to be 100% focused on planning, canceling other distracting work, and reacting immediately to planning related requests. After a brief trial, I asked teams to give feedback. They rated the shorter process as more effective while also yielding higher quality results. And by the end of the quarter, KR completion rates were noticeably increased, confirming that the resulting plan was also more realistic.

One objection I often hear is that “leaders should spend the majority of their time planning, because it’s their job.” I strongly disagree.

I believe that a leader’s job is to both create plans and execute them as planned.

While I acknowledge that leaders might have to spend a bit more time planning than others, high quality planning is largely a group effort that involves all team members. If leaders are already working on the next plan while their teams execute against the current plan, it creates a vacuum where the current plan no longer receives attention and support from leaders, while the new one is not yet active for teams. It is important to minimize the time spent in that vacuum.

Survey your company’s planning process across quarters.

To address pain points effectively, I recommend conducting a survey before and after implementing any planning changes. Below is a template you can use, that includes questions about the amount of time teams dedicate to planning, with an opportunity to express complaints. You can customize the template to suit your organization’s planning cadence and structure. Then, share out the survey each quarter and track sentiments using the dashboard provided.

Conduct a Planning survey

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M-shaped planning.

Good planning processes often follow an M-shaped pattern, as the information flow switches from bottom-up, to top-down, and back up, and repeated as necessary. The phases are:

Reflection: A period for reviewing performance of the last plan (e.g. last quarter’s OKRs) and identifying lessons learned.

Top-Down Guidance: Leadership outlines strategic objectives and high-level priorities to steer the team's focus.

Bottom-Up Planning: Team members contribute insights and suggestions for achieving goals, grounded in practical experience.

Integration: Top-down and bottom-up inputs are merged to create a cohesive, actionable plan that is feasible and aligned with company strategy.

Planning ends with the Final Presentation: A conclusive meeting where the integrated plan is presented to the company.

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This marks the transitioning into Execution: The phase where planning turns into action as teams implement the agreed-upon plan.

A few anti-patterns we’ve observed when interviewing companies include:

They don’t define and outline the different phases of the planning process. This leads to org-wide confusion on how planning is conducted, where they are in the process, and what is expected of each person.

They don’t have hard deadlines for the different phases, or they are unrealistic. Many teams spend too much time in one phase and try to speed through the others in order to make up for lost time. This leads to what feels like top-down mandates, making teams feel less ownership of their goals.

Their leadership doesn’t implement an integration phase, where they connect their top-down guidance with the bottoms-up plans of individual teams. Or the general sequencing is inefficient, causing planning to take too long or generating confusion on what’s been prioritized and what’s been cut.

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Optimizing the planning process.

There are a few best practices that I would recommend for every team.

Define and clarify each planning phase, including clear deadlines (expand to see more details).

For quarterly planning, my process looks like this:

Phase

Duration

Description

Reflections

Half day

Before we start planning, our leadership team meets for reflections about 2-3 weeks before top-down guidance.

Top-down guidance

Half to one day

Top down guidance is written and shared the Friday before planning week - to ensure everyone is aware as planning week starts

Bottom-up planning

3 days

Three days for bottom-up planning.

Integration phase

2 days

Two days for the integration phase. At the end of the integration phase, department leads prepare for their presentation.

Final presentation

90 minutes

All hands for the final OKR presentation first thing the week after planning week. The presentation marks the transition to execution

Execution

Rest of the quarter

Execution begins, running through the end of the quarter! Let’s ship things.

There are no rows in this table

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Clearly describe who is responsible for what in each phase. For example, if the top-down guidance is coming from the CEO or the department leads.

Make it easy and obvious for every team member to know what phase you are currently in and what they are supposed to do. For example, during planning, I send a daily Slack message containing what phase we are in and each person’s role. Even better, that message is actually automated and sent by our Coda OKR doc.

Beyond these general recommendations, there are a series of optimizations you can make to each phase in the M-shaped process:

1. Optimize reflections from the previous period.

The goal of the reflection phase is to look back on the past period (e.g. last quarter) and understand what worked well and what lessons to learn for the plan forward.

To make the reflection period run smoothly, I often recommend a few things...

Give all OKRs their final (progress) score. In

Integrate to drive execution⁠

we’ll discuss how to pull in execution data automatically into your planning doc to automate this work.

This template⁠

shows how to do so by syncing in your data from Jira.

Instead of a long–and admittedly dry–presentation about the past quarter, I’d recommend substituting an interactive doc, like a

two-way writeup⁠

, that can be read asynchronously. This has the nice bonus of documenting all of your lessons learned for future reference. Our

companion tutorial doc⁠

will also show how to do this in Coda.

2. Optimize providing top-down guidance to the team.

The goal of the top-down guidance phase is for leadership to clarify what they want to accomplish over the next quarter, which will set your team up for success in the next phase.

It’s critical to provide clear top-down guidance before bottom-up planning for a number of reasons:

Make sure your message is clear, pointed, and centralized so that your teams can easily reference it during their bottom-up phase and can easily find it throughout the quarter. Communicating your guidance in multiple places warps your message like a game of “telephone,” where everyone hears something different. In my experience, this often causes confusion across your organization and can cause you to miss planning deadlines.

Here are a few of my recommendations to keep in mind for this stage.

Top-down guidance should always be given before bottom-up planning.

Guidance should live in a writeup within your centralized planning doc so everyone can find it, even long after planning is finished.

Setting your teams up for success starts with efficient decision making among the leadership team. There are many different (and even fun) ways to support this, like

gamestorming⁠

. Personally, I love using the

$100 dollar voting exercise⁠

at this stage. It’s a great tool to determine priorities in an environment with scarce resources, and I have regularly seen it provide invaluable input to decide on the company’s top priorities.

3. Optimize bottom-up planning within each team.

The bottom-up planning phase is the most exciting and chaotic phase of planning. This is where the creative energy of the entire company is unleashed to create solutions to both the problems outlined in the top-down guidance phase and ones even leadership might not be aware of. I’m always amazed what the collective minds of an organization can achieve here if handled the right way.

For reference, at Coda we spend more than half of our overall planning time here. Bottom-up planning takes not only time, but more importantly, focus. If your engineers, designers, marketers, product managers, and other team members are expected to propose creative solutions to strategic problems in addition to their typical day-to-day, you will not get the most out of planning. Instead, when you use the 10% rule, you keep the overall planning process very short, so you can afford to pause normal operations for two or three days and have everyone commit 100% to bottom-up planning.

If your teams struggles with this, my best recommendation is to create a team hub where you can add ideas throughout the quarter, maintain a running backlog of issues, and store customer feedback so you don’t spend days tracking down lost documents.

Bottom-up planning is my favorite part of the planning cycle. Here are a few of my favorite rituals for setting your team up for success and to get their creative juices flowing.

Set up a team hub to organize backlog items, collect ideas continuously, and track customer feedback. Learn more about team hubs in our department handbooks linked from

Want to learn more?⁠

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Nurture, scope, and prioritize ideas with your team through the

garden party template⁠

Make better decisions, more efficiently with collaborative methods like

post-up⁠

planning poker⁠

$100 voting⁠

unbiased voting⁠

, etc. For a full overview of gamestorming methods,

see the Coda Gamestorming toolkit⁠

4. Optimize integration top-down guidance and bottom-up plans.

Bottom-up planning typically ends with teams being overcommitted. It’s not uncommon for teams to be overwhelmed with top-down asks from leadership, dependencies from other teams, and tasks from their own roadmap. The integration phase reconciles bottom-up plans with top-down guidance, helps teams prioritize their KRs, and reduces overcommitment.

The integration phase can be stressful, in particular for team and department leads, who have to work through a large number of issues in short time. You will always make tough decisions on what to cut and what to prioritize for the coming quarter. And that has a meaningful downstream impact on your teams. Here are my best recommendations to make the integration phase as smooth as possible for you and your teams:

The leadership team needs to make themselves available during this time to resolve any prioritization conflicts quickly.

Use

bullpen style meetings⁠

to work through many issues efficiently, in parallel, without creating calendar nightmares.

Throughout your planning, make tracking and acknowledging dependencies a priority. If you need tips on how to do this effectively, I will soon be publishing a step-by-step tutorial on how to do this. See for

Coda Tutorial for Planning & OKRs⁠

for early access.

5. Optimize the final presentation to the full company.

Planning should have a defined end-point at which planning ends and execution begins.

Most companies end the planning cycle with a final presentation to the CEO and other leadership or to the entire company. Personally, I’m a big proponent of having each team present their plans to the entire company so that everyone can get on the same page, ask questions, and rally together as the team enters the new execution period.

Here are my recommendations to create the most understandable final presentation for your CEO or your broader organization:

Keep each team’s presentations short and punchy. At Coda, we restrict each team’s time to 5 minutes, plus 3 minutes for Q&A moderated

by a Dory⁠

Teams should boil their plans down to the what and why, and if necessary, what they are not doing. One cheat code is to use prerecorded presentations to make sure they are on time and re-watchable later on.

Simplify creating the final presentation by keeping your writeups, data visualizations, mockups, and more in your planning doc throughout the previous phases. Keeping everything in one place makes it easier to pull your final presentation together.

For more on how to efficiently run the final OKR presentation, check out our tutorial in

Coda Tutorial for Planning & OKRs⁠

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Define the planning output How planning dimensions and output are the bedrock of effective and efficient planning.⁠

Integrate to drive execution How to integrate planning into execution and hold the team accountable.⁠

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