Product Management. Annual Planning: Instruction for Use
For IT planning a year ahead is the maximum. Even a quarter ahead can be quite difficult to predict. But the task of the Product Manager is not to “hit the bull’s eye”, but to think of the right direction in which to go. It is possible to miscalculate, but having a plan is already a step forward in the desired direction.
We start planning from the smallest to the largest:
- Description of the product or function;
- A plan for the quarter with links to descriptions;
- A plan for the year, which is interconnected with the quarterly plans.
In practice, it usually goes like this — The PM and the company’s management show each other their plans for the year and which are then combined into a unified document. At the very beginning, the PM evaluates how much the company and the target audience needs the planned product.
What is included in the plan for the year
Vision — expectations from the product in the coming 3–5 years. This section helps predict industry changes. Perhaps users will switch over to mobile or, conversely, to VR. The PM describes the vision in an essay format that is one or two pages long, which suggests how users are expected to interact with the company’s product in 3–5 years. Thus, he or she describes the processes that can already be launched as early as this year. The essay is written at the start of the project, but and the vision is then analyzed by the PM once a year for the appearance of new global changes that may affect the product.
Strategy — is planned for 1–2 years ahead. In short, it characterized as follows: Run — operational activities, Change — change of existing products, Disrupt — startups, new products. More on this some other time.
Project Management Method (OKR) — plans for the quarter, which are prepared in various formats. Alternatively, this can be a list of projects and metrics. De facto, these are the PM’s expectations, and this section includes references to the technical specifications (TS) for the projects.
Product Requirement Document (PRD). The TS with which Product works during the month.
Layouts, tasks. These are tasks in Jira that are worked on and completed on a daily and weekly basis.
Now let’s turn to the presentation of the annual plan, which answers the questions:
- What is the vision of the product?
- What is the plan to develop it?
- What parts are worth paying the most attention to?
The presentation for the year includes:
Business metrics. For example, the PM writes into that plan that work should be done on the VKontakte Music service and aims to increase the number of paid subscription users from 10 to 200 thousand.
The PM considers the plan and subsequently the projects that will help achieve this goal.
Adjustable service properties. For example, in addition to the VKontakte service, which can be used free of charge, the PM adds the function of purchasing advanced premium access. There will be those who use the service for free, and those who are willing to pay for additional functionality. Another example would be to add “work offline” function to the Yandex.Maps application.
Value.The PM evaluates how users could stand to benefit from a new feature and singles out a maximum of 3 changes.
Work processes. This is about the changes within the team. For example, how the speed and quality of work could be improved or made more predictable in terms of timelines.
The presentation needs to have examples for each section. The examples will show how work on the project is planned throughout the current year.
At the end of the year, the PM analyzes what objectives have been completed and what benefits the company and the users have gained. The PM must highlight the TOP-3 achievements or changes. He must be able to maintain proper focus — to highlight the things that are most valuable and not get bogged down on the little things that will not be important to the company in two to three years. This is what the presentation is for — to highlight the primary goal and return to it throughout the year.
Resources
By the time December comes around, the PM knows that an annual presentation is coming up. Time management and the ability to properly control the use of resources help him or her calculate the necessary preparation time. For example, he or she takes on fewer projects for the fourth quarter or frees up November entirely, thereby allocating time to work on the yearly plan.
If the PM has ideas for a new product, he or she lets the management know that additional team members are needed, as well as time for research and analysis of the relevant competitors. These are crucial points for which there is usually no separate time set aside, but which must be done regardless.
For emergency or extremely important tasks, the PM allocates extra time in percent form. For example, at first this would be somewhere around 20%, and throughout the course of the the process, the figure is adjusted to 5–10%. Such tasks are usually small and are not included in the long-term plan, but rather in the weekly plan.
In case a task arises that requires more time and/or resources than expected, then a conversation needs to be had with the company management and the PM needs to request a review and possible adjustment of the quarterly plans.
So,
The annual plan is your GPS. The more detailed you make the sections in the very beginning, the easier it will be to achieve your goals in the future.
The plan includes: the future vision of the product, its development strategy and management methods, and a document with descriptions, layouts and tasks for the teams.
The yearly plan is packaged into a presentation, the purpose of which is to let management know what the product will look like, what actions and resources are needed for its fruition.
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