When I shared my post about the value of writing weekly summaries months ago, I wasn’t sure how long it would be before I had a follow-up on it. Well, here’s the first follow-up on it!
An article that I was reading the other day triggered the inspiration for this post. While I struggle with many articles written by people without direct experience, I want to highlight a particular part of this article: “[Atlassian VP] Dean pushes Atlassian employees to keep 50% of their day open for individual-focused productivity.”
This quote spoke to me, as 50% is exactly the target I held myself to in my first two years at Zillow. Why this target? I made it up; it felt right for me as a TPM. While you are free to adjust the target, perhaps for other roles or levels – just don’t let picking a target get in the way of you getting started.
And what medium did I use to track this? Well, my weekly summary, of course!
So…how does one get started? If you look at your calendar, it might make you feel sick right now 🤢. Well, there’s good news! We all start here, and this is why this post is necessary. Even better news: you already did step 1.
As a follow-up to a previous post “Please, Stop Quarterly Planning: It’s Just Waterfall in Disguise,” I want to share what to do instead. I touch on this at the end of that post, but it felt worthy of its own, more detailed post. For details about why I don’t like quarterly planning, see that first post. But if you want solutions to replace it with, well, this post is for you.
So, what should we do instead? Two things:
1. Embrace a more flexible planning process, such as Kanban (just-in-time), and
2. Drive accountability through recurring business reviews every 2-6 weeks.
With these two things, you transparently cover the desired feedback cycle that quarterly planning provides while remaining truly agile. In other words, you create a simple, sustainable two-step flywheel. Let’s break these two components down.
Open LinkedIn – seriously, do it. I bet it’ll take no longer than five seconds to stumble upon a post with the word “strategy” in it. And I bet you’ll read it and go – “huh?” The example I found was along the lines of “just do these 10 easy steps and you’ll define everything you need for your entire company.”
I admit, this line from Good Strategy/Bad Strategy hits home: “A hallmark of true expertise and insight is making a complex subject understandable. A hallmark of mediocrity and bad strategy is unnecessary complexity—a flurry of fluff masking an absence of substance.”
Here’s a good rule of thumb: if you need more than one sentence to describe what a strategy is, you’re doing it wrong. This post will help you do it right!
Throughout my career, I have seen this process called quarterly planning become more and more popular across multiple companies for reasons I don’t understand. At a high level, quarterly planning could not be a better example of the now-antiquated waterfall methodology. What’s the issue with that? Well, keep reading.
If you read tech blogs at all, you’ll come across hundreds of “do these simple things to elevate your career,” or some other buzz-worthy headline. And you’ll read it, and if you’re like me, think “thanks for the high level information I already knew with no examples or data to explain or prove the value…” /sarcasm. So, what’s this post, then? Well, my own version, of course! But with a few key differences…
