As the new year approaches, product managers are preparing to set their teams up for success. While quarterly planning is a well-known strategy, executing it effectively can be a challenge. This blog will explore how to maximize your quarterly planning process in the coming year, ensuring alignment, adaptability, and continuous improvement. We’ll also highlight how Craft.io, your go-to product management tool, can streamline your efforts and enhance collaboration across teams.

Although they correctly devote their energy to pursuing their company’s high-level objectives, effective Product Managers also keep an eye on how their teams are progressing, day by day, in completing the product-related tasks that will help the company reach its objectives. Here’s why that’s a smart strategy.

At Craft.io, our mission has always been to give product teams and leaders the tools they need to make the best-informed decisions for their products’ success. And as a product professional yourself, you know that one of the most valuable tools available to any product team is visibility. That’s why, for example, we created Craft.io’s capacity planning and product portfolio management tools.

In our post announcing the Craft.io progress dashboard, we pointed out that this new tool makes it easy for product managers to visually analyze their progress on virtually any product-related metrics and categories: quarters, sprints, products, teams, objectives, etc. Users can also filter this data in any way they choose for even deeper insights – for example, to review how consistently a specific team has completed its tasks on time over several quarters.

One of the most valuable attributes of the Objectives and Key Results prioritization framework – and why we’re so thrilled that we’ve incorporated OKRs into the Craft.io platform – is how effectively it can help you bring together different departments across your company to work productively toward shared big-picture goals. Most of the other prioritization frameworks you’ve heard of – weighted scoring, the MoSCoW method, RICE, etc.

As a product professional, you know the dilemma well: You always have more ideas for your product than you have the resources, budget, or time to execute on those ideas. The same challenge, unfortunately, holds true for the broader business objectives you have in mind for your product – the marketing goals, sales goals, media goals, etc. No product team ever has enough resources to simultaneously achieve every business objective it thinks up.

If there’s a single macroeconomic indicator in early 2024 suggesting this year will be more stable than 2023, we haven’t seen it. Economies around the world are struggling. The job market has gone haywire. Plus, the tug-of-war continues between remote workers and employers demanding that they return to the office.

More than any other software tool you’ll find, Craft.io can help your organization centralize your product content companywide in a seamless, end-to-end environment. The native Craft.io platform provides intuitive tools that connect roadmapping, backlog management, prioritization, feedback analysis, dependencies management, capacity planning, and other key workflows.

Under the right circumstances and when used for their intended purposes, spreadsheets are among the most useful and impressive software tools ever developed. So, let’s get that out of the way upfront — we at Craft.io aren’t spreadsheet haters or skeptics. #GoSpreadsheets! In fact, we use them internally to build and manage our business. We just don’t use spreadsheets for our product work. Because… time and place.

For many businesses selling SaaS software and other modern tech solutions, the product mindset is built right into the corporate culture. But companies in older industries, such as bricks-and-mortar retail stores, have yet to embrace the product mindset – or, in many cases, even the product management role in general.