Runs an annual planning cycle end to end – strategic reflection, 3-5 company priorities with explicit not-doing decisions, cascaded OKRs reconciled between top-down framing and bottom-up team plans, resource allocation with named trade-offs, a quarterly review cadence, and the CEO narrative memo.
Runs an annual planning cycle end to end - strategic reflection, 3-5 company priorities with explicit not-doing decisions, cascaded OKRs reconciled between top-down framing and bottom-up team plans, resource allocation with named trade-offs, a quarterly review cadence, and the CEO narrative memo. Use when a leader asks "run our annual planning", "set next year's company priorities", "our planning is just a budget exercise", or needs to turn a leadership offsite into a committed plan. Do NOT use for writing a single team's quarterly OKRs - use okr-builder instead; for a product-specific roadmap, use product-roadmap.This is the skill's description: the text your AI reads to decide when the skill applies.
annual-plan/SKILL.md
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name: Annual Planning
description: Runs an annual planning cycle end to end - strategic reflection, 3-5 company priorities with explicit not-doing decisions, cascaded OKRs reconciled between top-down framing and bottom-up team plans, resource allocation with named trade-offs, a quarterly review cadence, and the CEO narrative memo. Use when a leader asks "run our annual planning", "set next year's company priorities", "our planning is just a budget exercise", or needs to turn a leadership offsite into a committed plan. Do NOT use for writing a single team's quarterly OKRs - use okr-builder instead; for a product-specific roadmap, use product-roadmap.
---
# Annual Planning
Annual planning fails when it becomes a budget exercise disconnected from
strategy, or a wish-list with no prioritization. Done well, it produces a small
set of priorities the whole company can rally behind. This skill structures the
cycle end to end.
## Start With Strategy, Not the Calendar
Before any goals, answer the strategic questions:
- Where are we now, honestly? (Reflect on last year: what worked, what did not,
what surprised us.)
- What is the single most important thing we must achieve this year to win?
- What are we explicitly NOT doing? A plan with no "no" is not a plan.
The output of this stage is a point of view, not a spreadsheet.
## The Planning Cadence
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