Planning Cadence

Planning Cadence Optimization

Align long-term strategy with short-term execution through structured, tiered planning rituals.

Help the user with planning cadence optimization using insights from 13 guests and posts across Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter.

How to Help

1. Audit Cadence - Evaluate if your current planning frequency matches your company size and market volatility.
2. Design Resolution - Determine which horizons require granular project detail and which should remain high-level strategic themes.
3. Select Framework - Choose between W, M, or rolling cycles based on your organization's need for top-down versus bottom-up input.
4. Refine Rituals - Implement weekly checkpoints to bridge the gap between quarterly goals and the immediate actions required to move metrics.

Core Principles

Strategy Before Rituals

Shreyas Doshi Live: "And the interesting I found is that because I had a real product strategy, not one of those fake ones, a real product strategy that I had gotten alignment on with everybody, my planning for this major product for Stripe took me like three days."

Efficient planning is a byproduct of having a real, pre-aligned product strategy rather than just completing bureaucratic rituals.

Weekly Momentum Over Deadlines

Christina Wodtke: "I would say, 'What am I doing this week to get closer to our goals?' If you could answer that question, you could give up all the OKR stuff, but if you just asked the question, 'What are we doing this week to get closer to our strategic goals, our longer term goals?' That is the very heart of it..."

Shift focus from distant deadlines to the immediate actions required this week to ensure current tasks move you toward strategic objectives.

Standardize for Variance Reduction

Eeke de Milliano: "Process, by definition, is variance reducing. You're introducing it, because you worry that the variance in your org is too high. You want people to sort of meet a certain standard. And the cost of that is obviously, while you are reducing the standard and bringing folks up to the average, you're also bringing other folks down to the average."

Implement processes specifically to reduce unacceptable variance in standards while shielding high-performers from unnecessary friction.

Enforce Strict Time-Boxes

Jason Fried: "We build products with two people at a time. So every feature we work on in Basecamp, or HEY, or whatever we're building is two people, one programmer, one designer, and they have a maximum of six weeks to deliver the feature that they're working on."

Capping development cycles at six weeks and using small, autonomous teams prevents bloat and maintains organizational momentum.

Rolling Cycle Flexibility

Paige Costello: "Before, we planned annually primarily. Now, we plan every six months, but for a rolling 12 months. So we have higher confidence in the immediate half, lower confidence in the following half, but we just plan every 12 months, every six months because it gives our business more confidence in what's coming and a better opportunity to align our go-to-market and product planning."

Transitioning to rolling planning cycles provides the flexibility to adapt to new information while maintaining long-term alignment.

Tiered Planning Resolution

From "How Notion builds product": "All that said, we roughly plan for each half, with differing resolutions for the two quarters. As an example, at the beginning of this year, we said for Q1, list out all of your projects in detail with a prioritization of the roadmap, and for Q2, just give some high-level bullet points of what you think you’ll be working on."

Detail specific projects for the immediate quarter while keeping the following quarter as high-level bullet points to allow for flexibility.

Big Boulder Alignment

From "How Snowflake builds product": "We spend a good bit of time on planning, and planning frequently, with both quarterly and annual planning cycles. I sometimes joke that if it’s been more than six weeks without some planning exercise, my email must not be working."

Establish a small set of high-level company priorities that all individual team plans must map back to for organization-wide alignment.