ISSUE #18 - MAY 25, 2023
Reflection Documents: Before crafting your next quarter's plan
Over the years, "reflection documents" have helped me and my teams improve how we set goals, create plans and collaborate as a team.
Each team and each product manager have their own routines when it comes to quarterly planning. On a high level, most of them consist of the broader stages of reflection on what happened in the previous quarter, where we stand against the broader company goals, and of course, the goal setting and planning for the next quarter. People often tend to focus a lot on the last stage while neglecting the importance of the first one.
I believe that to ensure that you constantly improve as a team, the stage of the reflection on what happened in the previous quarter is as important (if not more) as the goal-setting and planning stage. In this post, I am talking about one of the main ingredients of my own pre-quarterly planning routine.
Before I jump into the low-level details, I must mention that my teams are working on a quarterly time horizon, using the OKRs framework to set our goals and objectives.
So, the ingredient I am referring to is the "Reflection Doc". It is a document that is crafted by the team's product manager and consists of four main sections: The first three are the OKRs Evaluation, the OKRs Contribution Review, and the Initiatives Review. The last section is based on the outcome of the previous three and is a list of Learnings and Suggestions for the next quarter. Let's see, in detail, what each of those sections contains.
OKRs Evaluation
There are no surprises here. The first part of our reflection document is a classic evaluation of our objectives and key results. We are practically looking to answer the question, "Did we manage to deliver the OKRs we committed at the beginning of the quarter?" It's important to present the OKRs in a structured format, including our baseline and monthly checkpoints. Under each objective and key result, especially in cases where we didn't achieve them, there should be a justification for what went wrong. This justification should be descriptive and enable even people with minimal context to understand what we could have done better to achieve our goal.
OKRs Contribution Review
This is one of my favorite parts. After reviewing each OKR regarding whether we achieved it, we also have to evaluate it as a goal. In other words, we must review each objective and assess if it contributed to the overall strategy. Likewise, we review each key result and evaluate its contribution to its relevant objective. Simply put, we are trying to answer the question, "If we hadn't worked to achieve this key result, would we still be able to achieve our objective"? This way, we are improving how we set our OKRs, making them more meaningful and impactful.
Initiatives Review
In this section, we list every single initiative we worked on over the quarter. For each initiative, we must point out what worked well and what needs improvement. That could be anything around our processes, team communication, low-level planning, or even team collaboration. The goal is to have an honest assessment of things that we do well, and we must ensure that we keep, as well as things that we're doing poorly and ensure that we change.
Learnings & Suggestions for next quarter
The last part is creating a list of learnings and suggestions derived from the previous three sections. Those learnings and suggestions should be actionable items that should be used to inform the way in which we set goals and plan intitiatives for the upcoming quarters, but they will also drive changes in how we work.
This is it when it comes to the content of the reflection document. However, the job doesn't end here. Once the document is crafted, it's shared with the rest of the team. The team must review and comment on it. Once this happens, a meeting is held, during which the team will discuss the content of the reflection document. The objective is to agree on the learnings of the quarter and decide on how these learnings can be incorporated into the upcoming quarter's plan.
Once my team's planning process starts, the reflection document is always the first thing I work on. Over the years, it has helped me and my teams improve how we set goals, create plans, and work as a team. It is also a great tool to ensure internal alignment within the product team and the rest of the company stakeholders.
Past Newsletters
ISSUE #17 - MAY 25, 2023
Pre-PMF: Prioritizing the right items to work on
In this post, I am not talking about prioritization frameworks. I aim to present you with some of my learnings about pre-PMF prioritization, most of which I had to..
ISSUE #16 - APRIL 19, 2023
Don't rely on NPS to make decisions for your product. Here's why.
NPS is flawed by nature as a product metric. In this post, I'm showcasing why it's not a good idea for product leaders to use it as a metric based on which they..
ISSUE #15 - MARCH 28, 2023
10 Books that you MUST read as a Product Manager
A list of books that I found particularly useful to my product management journey up to now. And probably one of the few that doesn't contain Inspired.
The Product Notebook by Manos Kyr.
Once every month, I’m sharing my thoughts on product, growth & entrepreneurship.
Copyright © Manos Kyriakakis