Guide your product successfully through the annual planning process

President Dwight D. Eisenhower is credited with saying: “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” The point is that nothing goes according to plan, but having explored the options and contingencies, you gain the knowledge you need to select the appropriate actions as things unfold.

In general, I encourage my teams to do more planning than most because I find the act of preparing the plans forces one to think through most eventualities. And thus, they can think faster on their feet as the coming year unfolds.

Planning Season

In most large product-focused companies, mid-summer is when you start the planning cycle for the coming year that starts January 1. At Amazon, that meant it was time to develop your first operational plan. If all goes well, this plan will get approved by your leadership in August or September. But not before you have to hone and perfect it.

I consider the Operational Plan a required strategic planning document. It is the natural next step if you want to turn your vision into reality. (This works for start-ups too.) It is a critical framework for making the case for your product in a world of tight budgets.

Self-Guided Tour

I see the outline of an operational plan as a self-guided tour. I use the format to gather my thoughts, even when I am working in an organization that doesn’t formally use them. I highly recommend it as a tool for those I mentor. The pieces are like lego blocks and can be re-arranged to fit into most other strategic planning formats. Sections can be easily copied into emails to make your case.

Building Blocks

You must write some sort of operational plan to make the case for supporting and funding your product/program in most companies. For those new to the annual planning process, I like to breakdown the first operational plan as so:

Five Key Parts

• Strategic Overview — Set the scene. Establish the rules of the road. Clarify the goals.

• Learnings — Review what was learned. What were the hits, misses and learnings so far?

• Key Initiatives — This is the heart of your plan. What are your big plans for the year? What are you betting on?

• Team & Tech Stack — Who and what technology will make this strategic vision a reality?

• Roadmap — Roughly how are you going to get there.

• Appendix — Press Release for key initiatives and FAQs for same and your product in general. Any critical mockup and research studies can also be appended.

Note: The second operational plan, presented in December, is more detailed with a focus on how to hit the ground running on January 2.

Step-by-Step Guides

The following short articles (some still TBD) address the elements of each section of the OP1, as I leverage it today.

Dive Deeper

1. Overview

   • Scope of the Team and Product

   • Vision and Tenets

   • Goals

2. Learnings

   • Hits, Misses and Learnings

3. Key Initiatives

   • Spell out your top initiatives/big bets

   • Grid form for your plans

4. Team and Tech Stack

   • Overview of Tech Stack

   • Current Team Structure

5. Roadmap

   • Key Milestones

   • Roadmap Grid or Visualization

Bonus:

• Include an easy to read table of S.M.A.R.T. goals

• Always be ready with what you would do with extra funding

Photo by Daniel Kuruvilla on Unsplash