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# Quarterly Planning for Small Teams — Fieldnotes

## Article

Most planning advice is written for companies with program managers, steering committees, and a budget for off-sites. Small teams need something lighter: a cadence that produces a short list of commitments without consuming a week of calendar time.

This article describes the three-meeting structure we have used for two years across product and platform work. It optimizes for one thing: **every commitment has an owner and an explicit "stop doing" counterpart.**

## The three meetings

The whole cycle fits in five working days and three meetings, each with a fixed agenda and a hard stop.

| Meeting | Length | Output |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Retrospective | 60 min | Three lessons, written |
| Options review | 90 min | Ranked candidate list |
| Commitment | 45 min | Final list with owners |

## Writing the options memo

Before the options review, one person writes a two-page memo listing every candidate project with a one-paragraph case. The discipline of the memo matters more than the meeting itself; half the candidates usually eliminate themselves on paper.

![Planning cadence diagram](https://example.com/images/cadence-diagram.png)

The five-day cadence at a glance.

## Common failure modes

Three patterns account for most failed quarters:

-   **Carry-over creep.** Unfinished work re-enters the list without re-justification.
-   **Owner inflation.** A commitment with two owners has no owner.
-   **Silent scope growth.** The "stop doing" list is ignored after week two.

The fix for all three is the same: the written memo is the source of truth, and anything not in it does not exist.

![Printable planning checklist](figures/checklist.png)

## What to measure

Track only two numbers per quarter: the fraction of commitments delivered as written, and the number of unplanned projects that displaced planned ones. Both are countable in an afternoon and resist gaming better than velocity-style metrics.

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