Why most product planning is bad and what to do about it

Summary

TL;DR: We tried OKRs, they created more ceremony than clarity. Our solution: Problem Driven Development, a 4-day quarterly process focused on identifying problems (not solutions), prioritizing as a team, and committing publicly. It's kept us shipping at velocity even as we've scaled to 1.7M+ users.For most of my friends and colleagues at mature software companies, there are usually three ways for an item of work to get put on the board to eventually be done.There is a giant ceremony that determines what gets done by a grab bag of metrics.A deal gets blocked by a missing feature, and the engineering team scrambles jets to eliminate the blocker.Founder feels like we have to build something.Thats not to say that every company is a disorganized mess or a bureaucratic hell scape but, I have never met any engineer who said: “Wow, I just love my company planning process.” These words are seldom spoken in the english language. Railway, was fast approaching 1. and 2. at the same time. Despite us using excellent tools (shoutout Linear) planning is much as a cultural phenomena as well as an interesting engineering problem. From our perspective, we would finalize the features and the requirements what we would want to build once every 3 months and then at times get blindsided every now and then from a new business priority or an incident. Especially now serving 1.7M+ customers, we have to aggregate our taste, feedback, and opportunities and make a roadmap that will get us everything we ever wanted.This was an issue.Why write about something that you would read in Rand’s? It’s Q4 for those who celebrate, and we felt that reigniting the agile vs. waterfall armistice needed to be torn up. (Besides, we’re blogging like it’s 2005.)…and we have spent the better part of 18 months to improve our planning so that we finally get to a process that is not bad, and if you’d like, you can steal it, so that you can deliver excellent products.Mike Tyson asked about his fight plan against Evand...