Mastering Mid-Term Alignment: How to Run Effective Quarterly Reviews
Successfully mixing results, learnings, and plans, in a collaborative environment that fosters accountability
As we reach the end of the year, many companies and teams are doing reviews, plans, roadmaps, OKRs, budgets…
These meetings often seem to have random formats or become ad-hoc, depending on who decides to present or request what particular info they are interested in.
While flexibility is much appreciated, it's crucial to review a minimum set of topics, typically every quarter, to ensure alignment. Let’s explore them and see a minimal format you can implement in your upcoming end-of-year review.
Product Alignment Rhythm
Product organizations have different cycles that require different levels of alignment.
For example, we may review KPIs and discovery weekly, development results on a bi-weekly cadence, monthly OKR check-ins, etc.
Quarterly (Strategy) Review
In this rhythm, one of the critical ceremonies is some form of quarterly review. They are usually called strategy reviews because we want to:
Keep it based on outcomes and higher-level initiatives
Discuss if, based on results, we should consider changing direction and/or structure
See if the learnings affect the roadmap
The goal of this meeting is (or should be) very ambitious:
Review the results we achieved in the past quarter and how our bets resulted.
Review the learnings and how they impacted our understanding of the opportunity space.
Review the plans and expected outcomes for the future quarter.
Let’s see each of each step.
1. Reviewing quarter results
The intention is to review the connection between the things we did and the ultimate goal the company was expecting.
Goal and North Star Impact
To do that, we can simply start with what goal(s) the team had for the quarter and what level of completion was achieved.
Since we want to have goals around the concrete KPIs related to the opportunities we worked on, it’s helpful to translate that into how much it impacted the North Star.
Opportunities
Similarly, we want to explain what opportunities (or problems) we pursued, why we believed they were important, and what our expected impacts were.
Bets
Finally, we list the things we did for those opportunities, the bets, initiatives, and iterations we explored, with their hypothesis and results.
2. Learnings and Impact in Opportunity Space
The second step is simply stating the impact of these results and learnings in the opportunity space.
Learnings
We want to capture two elements:
How the results impacted the opportunity space. Did we discover that one branch was less or more important than we expected?
What were other learnings we captured from discovery, market trends, competitors, etc.?
Opportunity Space
We finalize this step by showing the modified opportunity space.
3. Next quarter plans
As we move to the next quarter, we do something very similar to when we showed the results:
We state the specific goal we are targeting and its corresponding impact on North Star Metric if we do.
The opportunities related to it, and our understanding of their importance and evidence.
And finally, we share what bets we are considering.
Conclusion
Of course, each company will have its variations and things they want to prioritize in their analysis. But these initial elements help structure the conversation in a more outcome and opportunity-oriented way to focus on the right elements.