Let's talk about Annual planning

It’s that time of year again; a fresh year with fresh visions. It’s the time of year when teams set out their plans for what they want to achieve over the next 12 months and share these ideas with others, usually leaders, to secure support and often, more funding.

Last week I sat in a roadmap review for a team I closely partner with. They started off saying “don’t worry, it’s only a couple of slides.” That sentence made me worry. How can you summarise a whole year’s roadmap in just a couple of slides? What are they not telling me? How will I commit everything to memory as they rattle through this deck?!

The roadmap portion had been boiled down to just a single slide! One slide contained the whole roadmap! Just one slide. The team spent 35 minutes running through what the roadmap actually contained then sent the deck round for “reference”. This got me thinking. I was thinking about how this team had undervalued the importance of their strategy and how they had made this process wholly unscalable. Every time someone asked about their roadmap they would have to spend 35 minutes walking them through it.

The average human attention span is really short! Research has this pegged somewhere between spans 2 seconds to 20 minutes and it is decreasing too. So how could we ensure people are listening and ingesting the information that is so pertinent to success!?

Why are we still so reluctant to use the right tools for the job we are doing? It’s like giving a master carpenter just a sledge hammer and chainsaw! There would be no finesse or detail. So why do we do this to ourselves for such an important process?

What I learned from Amazon's annual planning process

At Amazon, the annual planning process is a big time investment. A roadmap is given the time and attention it deserves. A team will write a 6 page narrative summarising what they achieved in the last 12 months and what they are setting out to achieve in the next 12 months. There are hours invested in this, not only to ensure that the team is aligned to the vision, but that the document is easy to read and requires no explanation. The roadmap is then shared more broadly, read, and discussed.

This document is designed to be easily shared outside a team to other interested stakeholders and requires no commentary or introduction. The document lives beyond the meeting. I would often encourage new joiners to the team to read past roadmaps to get a sense of where the team had been and where they saw themselves going in the future. Whilst the roadmap review meetings were important to refine and hone, and also align to partnering teams, they weren’t required to fully understand.

I miss these roadmap review sessions and hope that they once again are a common feature in my annual calendar…and not just within Amazon walls.

What tools do you use for your annual planning?

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