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Just like last year, we made a script for our talk. We didn’t look at it while speaking, so the words may not match exactly, but it’s pretty close. And if you like the template, feel free to copy it and make it your own:
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33 mins 38 secs
17 mins 5 secs
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2.816 mins 33 secs
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Introduction
19
Good morning! Thank you so much for being here at Config and coming to see this talk!
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Last year... Yuhki and I were here at Config...
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And we gave our first talk ever together, called “rituals of modern product teams”....
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...which is based on a ton of research I’ve been doing talking to hundreds of companies about their rituals. I’ve become so obsessed with the topic that I’m writing a book on it.
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In last year’s talk, we specifically focused on meetings. We spend so many hours a day in meetings, and yet the overwhelming sentiment around them is that there’s boring and useless.
So, we broke down meetings and said there are really only 3 kinds of meetings...
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...and for each type of meeting, we shared rituals we learned from companies around the world... which were uniquely designed to make the meeting vastly more impactful and memorable.
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To our surprise, people liked our talk so much that we’re back for the sequel...
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and to focus on a different chapter of the book, on Planning.
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Now I know people have strong feelings about this topic.
Some people hate planning because it feels like a complete waste of time... I won’t reveal which of my reports actually said this...
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Some people see planning as a thing to “win” and can be found celebrating at the end of it, which is arguably a bit strange...
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The overwhelming sentiment though, is a sense of frustration that it feels broken.
Yes, this was actually from a past performance review, from Dylan. Thankfully I still have my job, but to be honest, this is the real reason I’m doing this talk, to get Shishir’s take on it since he’s been studying the topic for so long.
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Now it’s our feeling that planning doesn’t have to feel that way.
In fact, planning can be incredibly effective and even fun if it can be designed in the right way.
And today, we’re not going to just wow you with planning,
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we’re going to make planning wooooooooow!
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I know, some of you are like... what on earth is going on? Just... trust us, this will make sense later, we promise.
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Yuhki, we’ve had so much fun saying WOOOOOOOOOW. I know we’ll come back to it, but maybe it would be fun for everyone to get in the spirit a bit? Everyone clearly wants to say it.
Ok, everyone. When I count to 3, everyone say WOOOOOOOOOW. Ready?
1.... 2.... 3! WOOOOOOOOOW.
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We’ve talked to hundreds of companies about their planning process. Interestingly, they all seemed to fit the same pattern. You could fit anyone’s summary into a sentence, kind of like a Mad Lib.
It’s some algorithm your company chooses to run...
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at some cadence, every quarter, every half....
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and it ultimately produces a particular output.
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And you hold yourself accountable to it during execution via some kind of accountability protocol.
At the end of the day, it seems that planning always seems to be defined by their 4 basic ingredients.
So today, we’re going to dive into each ingredient to share some of our favorite lessons and rituals.
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1 Planning Algorithm
23
Let’s dive into the first ingredient, the planning algorithm.
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You’ll often hear about the planning process being described in the shape of a W.
Lenny Rachitsky, who is at Config today, explains this well, that a planning process often kicks off with top-down guidance and context from leadership. Teams propose plans bottoms-up in response; leadership synthesizes these into a cohesive plan, and teams make final tweaks and confirm buy-in.
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Some believe it should be more like an M-shape. Oliver, who leads engineering at Coda, believes that before any top-down guidance happens, there should be a moment of reflection from the team bottoms-up on lessons learned that help inform the plan.
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We’re not here today to tell you whether M or W is right.
But what we have noticed is, regardless of which direction you choose, there’s one way in which these planning processes are often fundamentally broken.
And it comes back to this sentiment I shared earlier. That there’s this feeling that planning is like a game you have to win. The whole point for some people is to get their project approved. To get more funding, more headcount, than other teams.
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In other words, planning algorithms produce winners and losers.
This feeling that planning is something you have to win... is really unproductive and kind of toxic.
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So this is what we have to unbreak! How might we make this less about winning, make planning feel less like a zero-sum game? And how do we instead make it about the true purpose of the planning algorithm — to get to a shared understanding of directions and priorities that help the entire company win?
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Ok let’s get started with our first ritual.
I really like Gamestorming’s “$100 voting” ritual as one solution to the problem.
Too often you’re in these planning sessions where there are like 20 different project ideas...
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...and somehow, every one of them....
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end up being P0s.
Now, how do you whittle it down? Lots of discussion. And of course it’s natural that people just advocate for their own team. After all, they are trying to “win” planning right?
So you end up with all this endless discussion. And after hours and hours, what happens?
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Success: you can mark one of these projects as P1
A huge win, right?
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The “$100 voting” exercise works exactly like it sounds. You give everyone $100, and you ask them to pretend they are the boss and they own the budget — how would you distribute those dollars across these different initiatives?
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It really works! It’s a bit like voting, but you get a feeling for how much people want one idea.
But that’s note the main point: The key is that it forces them to take off their team hat, and wear the CEO hat. It’s a real budget, with real constraint. And they forget about having their team win, and focus on what’s right for the company.
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We use this technique at Coda all the time. Our head of eng, Oliver, esp loves it. He’s German and he told me there’s actually a German word for it — he’s kept trying to teach me to pronounce it correctly but I’m not going to try on stage.
In any case, next time you see your planning process stuck with each team trying to “win”, try out $100 voting and see if re-orients everyone back to the company mindset.
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Airbnb has a different ritual that similarly encourages people to think beyond the confines of their own team and their own ideas.
They call it crafting the “11 star experience.”
So let’s start by imagining the 1 star experience. You get to your Airbnb, and no one’s there, and you can’t get in.
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Let’s skip to a 5-star experience. It’s one where everything worked as expected, with people answering the door and showing you around.
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A 6-star experience might be that you get in, you’re welcomed with a tour, there’s free wine, toiletries, and more.
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A notch above that might be that the host offers you to let you use their car, or they knew you’re into surfing and booked you some lessons for you.
The image of a guy in a tuxedo carrying a surfing board might be my favorite DALL-E creation.
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Chesky describes a 10-star experience is that you get off the plane, and it’s like the Beatles came to town. 5,000 high-school kids are cheering with your name written on your card welcoming you to the country...
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And maybe 11-star experience is Elon Musk showing up and saying “you’re going to space.”
(Though maybe that’s a 1-star experience for some of us!)
The point for Brian Chesky is that an 11-star experience may not be feasible. But if you go through the exercise, there’s some sweet spot between “they showed up and opened the door” and “I went to space”. And suddenly some of the things in between that felt hard feel right, and important to do.
And when you’re thinking so audaciously... you’re not thinking about your own idea winning. You’re focused on something so much bigger.
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And it’s not just Airbnb that anchors teams on these audacious goals.
So next time you’re trying to orient your team to plan without just focusing on their own team, think about stepping back and defining your version of the 11-star experience.
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And finally — there are many companies, like Uber, that ensures that anyone coming into planning has truly worn their customer’s shoes.
At Uber, there is a program to encourage employees to go out and drive for Uber, because it’s the one part of the experience that you can’t fully understand or empathize with unless you actually try it.
And as someone who drove 60 Uber trips myself, I can tell you...
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...it’s a really stressful experience!
This was a recording from my first drive ever! Suffice it to say I was not a 5 star driver.
The point, though, is that ... it’s only after you’ve truly internalized that end-user experience that you win the right to decide priorities for customer you’re building for.
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So, what do all of these rituals have in common? They are all designed to help people wear different hats, to think beyond their own individual teams winning. By making them act like leaders. By making them think about planning via the customer’s eyes. By anchoring them on such audacious goals that you’re forced to think beyond the confines of your team.
So these are the ideas for unbreaking the planning algorithm.
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2 Output
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It’s worth noting that there’s lots of debate on how many Big Rocks a team should have, and how much of your jar they should take up.
My personal view is that you should have no more than 3-4 Big Rocks and that they should take up less than 50% of your jar. The reason is that once you cross 50%, you see people start to feel really bad about not working on the Big Rocks, so you start to rename Little Rocks to become Big Rocks so everyone is “mentioned”. But then you’ve lost the point.
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One company that does this in a particularly unique way is Meta. Even from the early days of Facebook, they were famous for their Lockdown ritual. When Zuck sensed a big challenge that needs to be addressed immediately, he calls for a Lockdown. For example, when Snapchat had started proving that the Stories format was something users really loved, Zuck declared a Lockdown in response and worked to get their response out quickly.
You can think of this like having a single Big Rock for a short period of time. Not something that you can do for long periods of time, but incredibly clarifying when you need it.
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That was Big Rocks.
The next level more detailed output that a lot of companies use is OKRs, which is commonly used at Google. As a fun fact it was actually invented by Andy Grove at Intel.
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OKRs start pretty innocently enough. Take, for example, this top-level OKR, like increasing the number of weekly active users. Good goal, and straightforward, right?
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Now, as different teams start to fill out how they’ll support this top-level goal... as you go deeper and deeper, you start to see OKRs like this one:
Increase average design systems usage from 39% to 42%. It’s technically measurable and good and everything, but I look at that and don’t really understand what the team is trying to do.
In fact, it’s probably one of those OKRs where someone on the team isn’t thinking about it every day, or every week. And just something you measure at the end of the quarter and hope you hit the metric. And if you don’t... maybe you get a slap on the wrist but it doesn’t even feel existential to the business.
I think these are the kind of OKRs that cause people to lose trust in the OKR system.
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At Figma, I thought about different ways to combat this. But one thing started emerging in our planning FigJam files.
We have a tradition of doing all our company planning in one singular FigJam file. There’s something nice about seeing everyone’s work at once, and there’s something fun about collaborating in this really visual way on planning.
One key thing about FigJam is that it’s unstructured, and it encouraged people to express what they care about in really different ways.
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And I noticed teams starting to share different visuals that they care about, that they’re obsessed about. Maybe it was a customer tweet that they wanted to see. A chart with a metric they were really focused on. A mock that showed the experience they were trying to achieve. Or a embarrassing screenshot they were hoping to fix. And these were the easiest way to understand the team’s true north star.
This reminded me of, when we were at YouTube, Shishir would have us write two-pagers for our plans and share that “one visual” that we’re obsessed about. What I loved about it is that it avoided the need to focus on a contrived OKR, and was way more expressive and flexible in describing what the team really cared about.
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So we used a simple litmus test: imagine you asked everyone in the company to come in tomorrow and wear their team’s hoodie.
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Which hoodie...
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would they wear?
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3 Accountability Protocol
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Ok let’s move on to accountability protocol.
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I love to ask people this question: what is the goal of planning?
I’ll get lots of answers:
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But really, I think there’s a much clearer answer:
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A really great example of working backwards from designing the accountability protocol is Zynga’s ritual, which they call Blue Sheet.
The idea is simple — during planning, you come up with project ideas, and you write down what you believe the expected outcome is. Maybe its daily active usage of a new game, or the amount of money you’re going to make from a new feature.
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You then have a review every other week, where you’re going to check in on these projects.
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And the interesting thing is, every time you record the actuals. The Day 1 actuals.
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The Day 7 actuals in the next review.
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The Day 30 actuals.
And by the end of it, you have score card of how right or wrong you were, how your investments are paying off.
The rigor and the accountability that this ritual created was so intense that a former PM we talked to said he still gets the shivers whenever he hears the term “blue sheet.”
And the key here: the Blue Sheet ritual happened during execution. But because everyone knew it was going to happen, they adjusted their planning algorithm to fit.
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Well actually... I’m pretty sure Uber came up with it first, for what it’s worth...
(interjection)
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4 Timeframe
24
Let’s go to the last ingredient, the timeframe.
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One of the strangest things about planning is that there is this simultaneous sentiment that we spend too much time planning...
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...but also that people want more time planning.
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We talked to a lot of companies around how often they plan and how long they take....
A lot of companies did quarterly planning... and spent the month before the quarter starts to do the planning...
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Many of you are probably going to kick off annual planning this second half, and it’s not uncommon to start in September and take the remainder of the year.
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Now, when you really think about it... that’s actually a lot of time planning and not executing!
Imagine if you’re doing quarterly planning, 1/3 of your time is actually spent planning instead of executing! That feels alarmingly high, right?
Now, I know some of you may argue that it’s not the case that, during planning, execution entirely stops. But the problem is, people are distracted. Planning means anything could change, priorities can shift. You could be executing on a plan that could be entirely irrelevant when planning is done.
That’s why we like to discount the time executing during planning, because it’s just not the same.
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Our provocation, is that teams should spend less than 10% of their time planning.
So instead of it feeling like you’re constantly planning....
you plan once, and actually can save time to actually execute on that plan.
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Hence, wooooooooow, not wow planning. Each O here represents a cycle of execution, and you want there to be many of them!
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As an aside, this is why we chose to use W-shaped planning, not M-shaped since woooooooow felt a tad more aspirational than mooooooom planning!
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OK, so how do you get planning down to less than 10% of your time? There are rituals for this!
One way is to find the activities that are taking a disproportionate amount of time and figure out how to dramatically condense these.
One such activity is sorting through dependencies. Teams list out their projects and all their dependencies... and it always takes so much time deciding what project is feasible and which dependency you can actually counton.
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Maybe Team A has a dependency on platform team B, so they meet. And Team A meets all the other teams they have dependencies for to secure their project.
And when teams agree to dependencies, they have to let down other teams. So the next thing you know, you end up with meetings for every permutations of teams, and it gets messy really quickly.
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To solve this, Coda has a ritual called dependency bullpen.
The idea is simple: bring all of the team leads into one room.
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And instead of having one conversation, let everyone naturally form groups. The people who need to talk find each other...
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and they’re able to pull in other leads into the conversation as necessary.
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You have all the people you need to make a decision in a single room, and you can do so much more because the conversation is multi-threaded, versus single-threaded.
I like this idea so much that we are actually going to try this out for our annual planning process this fall at Figma, and I’m certain it’s going to save so much effort and time!
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What’s another way to get down to 10%?
One way is to look at all the activities that you’re currently doing during planning and really ask the question: do these need to strictly happen during planning?
Take a standard planning process:
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Do all of these need to happen during planning? It’s not the case, right? You could always be continuously gathering insights, not just during planning. Ideation can happen outside of planning, too.
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Let’s take gathering and sharing insights — I think a lot of companies have cool rituals around sharing these in a regular way.
Going back to Coda, they have a ritual called Stats ‘N stories, which actually was first inspired by Sports Center’s top 10 highlights.
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In this weekly meeting, the data team shares key metrics and insights.... and Sales, support, and resaerch teams share video clips from customers. It feels just like Sportscenter - but instead of watching sports clips, we’re watching our customers.
It’s a simple ritual, but this is obviously so much better to do outside of planning, so that teams are exposed to insights in a more timely way, and you already enter planning with a strong intuition on what’s important based on that, versus digging up reports, building new queries, and trying to uncover new insights at the beginning of planning.
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Now a lot of people are a bit daunted by the idea of just planning for 10%. What if you’re planning every six months — it’s a bit stressful to imagine that, in 2.5 weeks, you’re going to figure the entire six months ahead.
The reality is that there’s usually a major planning cycle and a minor one.
For example, at the NY Times, the team is intentional about keeping multiple planning timelines in mind.
Every day, they have to plan out the “paper” in what they call the “daily miracle” of producing the world’s best news. In fact, the top of the mast head has two coverage meetings every day to make sure they are covering the news with the right mix of ambition, urgency, and quality.
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Every six months, they run a fairly typical process of defining product roadmaps...
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... but what makes them unique is that they also do a 3-year budget to identify the biggest bets, like Games and Sports today....
and they do long-range planning, too. The shift from print to digital has been a multi-year plan that they’ve been executing on.
Now, importantly, the 10% rule still stands here. For planning the daily paper, you probably want an hour of planning. For quarterly planning, a week and a half. And for this long-range plan, probably many months of planning.
Having all of these different timeframes is actually helpful, so that the right amount of time is spent on long-term strategy, while you’re able to be nimble on the tactical short-term roadmaps.
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So, all of these are rituals that help you be more thoughtful about the time you spend planning, whether it’s 1) ways to collapse important activities to make them less time-consuming; 2) ways to take things out of planning that don’t need to be part of planning; or 3) ways to be more intentional about the different timelines you’re planning against, and have a way to do both major and minor planning.
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Conclusion
4
So those were our four ingredients of planning.
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And for each, a simple lesson:
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And if there’s just one thing you can remember, it’s that you don’t want WOW planning you want....
‘WOOOOOOOOOOW”
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Thank you so much for listening to our talk!
We’re making all our materials available to you again in the hopes that you’ll help advance the thinking on planning and share with each other rituals that you have to unbreak planning.
We used a lot of fun tools for this talk — a Coda doc for our outline, the brand new Figma Slides for our talk, so check these out.
And Shishir’s writing a book on all of this, too, so go that link if you’re interested in hearing about progress!
That’s it, and see you next time!
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