Quarterly planning tends to expand to fill a week. The core work — reviewing last quarter, setting 3-5 priorities, defining what success looks like — takes about 90 minutes if you're disciplined about it. This workflow encodes that discipline.
Last quarter retrospective
Goal: Honest read on what happened last quarter — hit, missed, learned.
Last quarter's stated priorities were [list]. Actual results: [paste]. Give me an honest read: what hit, what missed, what surprised us. Don't cushion. If we made bad calls, name them.
This quarter's 3-5 priorities
Goal: Narrow to 3-5 priorities that matter more than everything else.
Given last quarter's retro + what we know about the market/business today, draft 3-5 priorities for this quarter. For each: what specific outcome by end of quarter, what the leading indicators are month-by-month, who owns it. Cut ruthlessly — 3 is often the right answer.
The 'wrong plan' test
Goal: What would tell us this plan is wrong by mid-quarter?
Given the 3-5 priorities: what evidence — mid-quarter — would tell us the plan is wrong? Not 'we're behind on execution' but 'the priorities themselves are wrong.' Be concrete.
Repeatability, not cleverness.
What lives where when the workflow finishes.
Publish the 3-5 priorities where everyone can see them (docs, Notion, Slack canvas). Reference them weekly. Do the wrong-plan check at week 6.
The same shape, different jobs.
- Solo founder version: skip the ownership assignment; you own all of them. Otherwise identical.
- Team version: run the priority-drafting collaboratively with senior team; assign owners in the meeting.
- Annual version: same structure, longer horizon (12 months), fewer priorities (2-3 max at annual scale).
Try this workflow once. Then decide if it earns a recurring slot.
The value compounds after the third run, not the first.