An intentionally lightweight goal-setting process.
A key aspect of the YouTube model was that our deep strategy discussions would happen every six months as we did strategic planning. That meant that our “sprint planning” was intentionally very lightweight.
We did this process at YouTube in a very complex set of spreadsheets with a lot of appscript to try to simulate multiple editable views. The below template accomplishes a similar goal.
You can replicate this process for you team by clicking this button to
Note: Goals here were meant to be concrete and measurable. Because of the fast frequency, sometimes they will be intermediate milestones before a full ship or coordination milestones — "Team A will get X ready so that team B can do Y in the next sprint."
, teams can indicate if a goal depends on another team.
The dependency model here is intentionally light. It is straightforward to add workflow — like asking for and accepting dependencies or adding the ability to depend on a specific goal — but I found it best to start with something much simpler and see if that is necessary.
Progress and scoring: As the sprint progresses, teams periodically update the progress for each goal in