Quarterly Planning
One-Pager.
Pre-quarter prep, 90-minute agenda, decision rules, output format. The thing senior PMs hoard.
Quarter: ______
Date: ______
Most quarterly planning meetings fail before they start — the PM walks in without a capacity model, without scored options, without pre-aligned stakeholders. This template fixes that. Do the prep. Run the 90 minutes. Ship the output. The meeting is the easy part.
Pre-Quarter Prep Checklist
Complete every item below before the meeting. If you walk in without these, you’re running a discussion, not a planning session.
- Signal review. Read every customer signal from the closing quarter, themed and ranked. (MindBacklog or your equivalent.)
- OKR check. Confirm or revise the 2–3 quarterly objectives with leadership. No new objectives in the planning meeting.
- Last-quarter retrospective. What shipped, what slipped, what got cut. One paragraph each.
- Capacity model. Team weeks × focus factor × discovery overhead = available delivery weeks. (Math below.)
- Dependency map. Which other teams must commit something for our priorities to ship? Pre-confirm before the meeting.
- Top-12 candidate list. Pre-scored (RICE or WSJF). Don’t bring 40 items — bring the cut list.
- Carry-over audit. What didn’t finish last quarter? Decide kill / continue / reduce-scope before the meeting.
- Stakeholder pre-reads sent. 48 hours in advance. Format below.
- Engineering capacity sanity-check. Walk the candidate list with the eng lead privately. Flag anything that’s 2x your estimate.
- Sales/CS pipeline check. Any deals or renewals dependent on a specific feature this quarter? Surface them.
- Risk list. Top 3 things that could derail the quarter. Have a mitigation per risk.
- Decision log open. One doc, capturing every decision made in the meeting in real time. Not after.
Stakeholder Pre-Read Template
One page. Sent 48 hours before the meeting. Goal: stakeholders walk in informed, not curious.
The 90-Minute Agenda
Six blocks. Time-boxed. The PM is the timekeeper. If a block runs over, it cuts into the next block, not the wrap.
| Mins | Block | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| 10 min | Context | Where we are vs. OKRs. What shipped, what slipped. PM-only talking. No discussion yet. |
| 20 min | Priority Pitches | 5 minutes per top priority. Owner pitches: signal, OKR linkage, score, effort, kill criteria. 2 min Q&A each. No debate. |
| 30 min | Decisions | Walk the open decisions. Apply the 80% rule. Disagree-and-commit anything below threshold. PM logs each decision live. |
| 15 min | Capacity Model | PM walks the math (below). If priorities exceed capacity, drop the lowest-ranked until it fits. No scope-stretching. |
| 10 min | Commitment | Each owner verbally commits to their priority and the kill criteria. Capture in the decision log. |
| 5 min | Wrap | Restate the 3 priorities, the mid-quarter checkpoint date, and what’s explicitly NOT happening this quarter. |
Decision Rules
Three rules, stated at the start of the meeting. They’re what stop the meeting from sprawling.
The Capacity Model
The math that prevents overcommitment. Run it live in the meeting on a screen. Do not negotiate the focus factor.
| Input | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Engineers | 8 | Excludes managers if they don’t code |
| Quarter weeks | 13 | Standard quarter |
| Total person-weeks | 104 | 8 × 13 |
| − PTO / holidays (10%) | −10 | Use historical average |
| − On-call / interrupts (15%) | −15 | Track this; don’t guess |
| − Discovery overhead (15%) | −15 | Specs, prototypes, customer calls |
| − Meetings / context-switch (10%) | −10 | Standups, reviews, planning |
| Available delivery weeks | 54 | ~52% focus factor |
Most teams plan to ~80 weeks of work for a real 54. That’s the source of every “we missed Q3” conversation. Plan to 54. Hold the line.
The Output Format
One page. Distributed within 24 hours of the meeting. The doc that everyone references for the next 13 weeks.
| Priority | Owner | Success Metric | Dependencies | Kill Criteria |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 Search redesign w/ semantic match | PM-A / Eng-B | Activation 25%→35% by week 10 | Data team: query logs | Adoption <15% at week 8 |
| #2 SAML/OIDC SSO for enterprise | PM-A / Eng-C | 3 enterprise deals unblocked | Security review by wk 4 | SSO not unblocking pipeline by wk 8 |
| #3 Mobile push notifications fix | PM-B / Eng-D | Push opt-in >60%, crash <0.5% | None | Crash rate above 1% post-release |
Explicitly NOT happening this quarter: bulk-edit, dashboard themes, GraphQL migration, AI auto-summarize. Listed by name so no one is surprised in week 6.
Mid-Quarter Checkpoint
Four weeks into the quarter. Asynchronous, 5-minute write-up per priority owner. No meeting unless something changed materially.
- Status: on-track / at-risk / off-track. One word.
- Metric so far: the success metric’s reading at week 4.
- What changed: any new signal, dependency, or scope shift since planning.
- Kill check: did we hit the kill criteria? If yes, propose the kill.
- Ask: one specific thing you need from the room.
Common Quarterly Planning Failures
- Too many priorities. Five “#1s” means none. Hard ceiling: 3 priorities. Anything else is a nice-to-have.
- No kill criteria. If you can’t state when to abandon a priority, you can’t learn from it. Kill criteria are non-negotiable.
- Capacity overcommit. Skipping the focus-factor math. The capacity model is the thing that holds the room accountable to physics.
- Dependencies underestimated. Counting on another team without their written commit. Pre-confirm or descope.
- No mid-quarter check. Without it, week 4’s drift is week 12’s missed quarter. Schedule the checkpoint at planning, not later.