> Source: https://chrisbee.medium.com/presentation-video-and-slides-getting-your-teams-running-like-clockwork-e107554b9e01
**Planning**
- Strategic Priorities - Top down direction. Key initiatives and OKRS
- New lines of business, new opportunities. Investors, market, competitive factors. Big multi-cycle efforts. New org structures, new investment areas.
- Company OKRs - Fundamental, Unifying, Motivating → Inform team OKRs
- Product Strategy - Bottom's up portion. Create product vision. Get feedback.
- Total addressable market opportunity. Competitive position. Target customers and value prop. Long term (2+ year) vision. Team OKRS. T-shirt size costing. Cutline for what's in and out of scope. Headcount plan including what you would do with more people. Risks and barriers. Review with everyone.
**Execution**
- PM Toolkit
- Intake - Input from brainstorming and planning, sales and customer support, technical migrations and big tech debt. **Create formal input for noisy channels.**
- Backlog - Prioritized weekly by EM/PM
- 3 sections. What we've committed to this cycle, what we've got on deck, icebox.
- Title, Description that anyone can understand, ranking
- Items should be projects (2+ weeks) not tasks. Features and platform investments only, bugs tracked separately. Kept in jira or spreadsheet.
- Prioritization: (Modified RICE? Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort)
- Assign which OKR or KPI it will drive. Score 1-5 for impact. Score 1-5 for eng cost. Weight. Sort.
- Resource Plan + Roadmap - Updated weekly, have 2-3 months planned by EM
- Roadmap overview / Project tracker. Each project has PM and Tech lead. Week by week milestones.
- May just show first stage of research/planning
- Resource plan: Who is going to be focused on what, week to week. Include ooo, holidays, onboarding, training, etc. Sanity check of commitments. Can help with career planning and motivation.
- Product Tracker - Dates / Status. Good way to separate out details for execs. Source of truth for milestones, reviewed every 2 weeks.
- Agile Development:
- **Project Checkpoint Process**
- Project Start - Product Brief and UX Design: Customer problem. Customer promise. Why now? Research and insights. Target OKRs. Target experience outcomes. Scenarios in scope / out of scope. Dependencies. **Functional requirements / use cases. UX and visual design.** Attributes of successful design. Feature discovery experience. A/B testing and rollout plan. GTM plan. Risks. FAQs.
- Checkpoint 1: Req'ts ready
- Tech Design Doc with Tasks and Estimates → Committed milestones with dates on roadmap and/or status tracker. Project summary, basic requirements, block diagram, sequence diagram, API definition and documentation, services and artifacts impacted, new modules/components, triggers/actions, UX links, AB buckets and treatments, obsolete code to be removed or replaced, expected performance impact, test plan - unit tests, automated, manual. **Task breakdown and costing.** **Dates bottom up from eng team based on design and scoping.** If dates MUST be met, adjust scope or resourcing.
- Checkpoint 2: Costing Done ("Dev Commit")
- Core coding, QA, bug fix, release
- Checkpoint 3: AB test / pilot
- Results analysis and iteration
- Checkpoint 4: 100% Launch
- Results: more thoughtful product and tech design, less rework, less last minute scramble, high planning accuracy, drove accountability, set expectations, single source of truth, created right level of visibility
- **Clockwork Execution Process**
- Project backlog, bug backlog. Put together into sprint kanban. Ship whenever you're done