Elezea: resources for product leaders - Welcome to annual planning season
Hi there, and welcome to another edition of Elezea! This is a newsletter focused on interesting and helpful reading about technology, software development, and internet culture. It’s mid-November, and we know what that means… it’s planning season. Our team is always looking to improve the way we plan, so we are considering a few changes this go-around that I thought I’d share. First, it’s important to note that our general framework hasn’t changed. We use W Planning because we believe that having our entire team intimately involved in the work we prioritize is a superpower and we don't want to lose that:
The part where we sometimes get stuck is that second phase—Plans. How do we generate enough possible opportunities/solutions without going into so much detail on each that planning takes weeks and weeks and just starts to feel exhausting? Luckily Lenny Rachitsky came along with another well-timed post, this time an interview with Figma CPO Yuhki Yamashita. Figma’s planning cadence—along with the way they use themes instead of detailed project plans in the beginning phases of planning—really resonated with me:
So here’s what we’re considering this time around for our version of W planning… Phase 1: ContextThis is our published product strategy¹ that the entire team collaborated on. It includes all the strategic context the teams need to make decisions about what to work on. Phase 2: PlansInstead of detailed project plans (you can see the format we use for project plans here), each team can get together separately before our leadership planning week, and brainstorm the themes they would like to focus on in the first half of the year to meet our goals. Something like this (stolen and adapted from Figma): The actual problems / themes could be more or less than 3, that specific number is not important. But this way we get the team’s input on the major high-level themes we want to address to meet our goals. In this phase we don't do detailed project plans, we come up with themes of focus, lightly defined. Phase 3: IntegrationDuring leadership planning we discuss and debate the themes that come out of every team, fold in the context of larger organizational goals, and decide on a combined list of top themes we want to focus on in 2023. Phase 4: Buy-inWe kick off team planning by presenting the themes to the team, getting feedback, and working towards buy-in. We then move into detailed project plans during our dedicated planning week. Will this process work better than last time? I hope so, but I’ll let you know! Whatever happens, I know that we’ll keep iterating… → As luck would have it, First Round just published a great list of planning frameworks (including our preferred “W Planning” method): Annual Planning in Uncertain Times: 6 Tactics for Rethinking Your Company’s End-of-Year Exercis What I’m readingPaul Stamatiou wrote a wonderful post on product quality, simply called Craft. This is such an important point that we often don’t realize:
Quality is a vital component of the system that makes up the software development lifecycle—just as much as design or writing code is. Teams need a commitment to things like measurement, SLOs (Service Level Objectives), and integration testing if they want to build quality software. It isn’t something that can get added to a product as an afterthought through manual testing and/or bug fixes. In the post Paul goes on to list a bunch of things that can affect the quality of a product, including culture, incentives, skills, and tools. Anne Helen Petersen has a great interview with Adrian Hon about gamification in apps, including the big question: How Did We Get So Obsessed with Streaks?
“Ensure that apps don’t punish people for being human” is a phrase that’s going to stick with me for a long time. That sentiment also reminds me of something Rob Horning points out in Mass extinction event—that the thing that really makes social networks successful is an effective exploitation of our humanity:
And finally this week,Jackie Bavaro has some great career advice for PMs in The 3 Stages of a Product Manager's Career:
Some stray links
Some good tweetstwitter is like a husband that i hate & then i found out he had 10 days to live and it made me feel sweet and sentimental & now we are on day 11 and i am just looming over his sleeping body with a pillow in my hands 1 We recently revised our product strategy as whole team, together. If there is any interest in that process and how we worked together, let me know and I can write about it! |
Key phrases
Older messages
How we are transformed by the places where we work
Saturday, November 12, 2022
Also how the Twitter meltdown shows us the power of microservice infrastructure
Visionaries vs. Integrators: a crucial distinction in work relationships
Tuesday, November 8, 2022
Also some stuff about Green Day and Bono. Don't @ me.
Responsive roadmaps, and three management behaviors to strive for
Friday, November 4, 2022
Also a bit about the brand journeys of Liquid Death and Folgers Coffee.
Improving product roadmaps, and a framework for becoming a better manager
Wednesday, November 2, 2022
Oh, and I guess we also have to talk about Twitter
Resources for Product Leaders #5
Monday, July 18, 2022
Finding clarity of purpose, impactful questions to ask yourself as a manager, and developing healthier communication patterns in your team,
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