2019 Strategic Planning
Overview
In the fall of 2018 Quartet’s board installed a new CEO, who wanted to rapidly establish a new strategy and create company-wide functional plan for 2019. I was tapped as one of three strategic planning leads tasked with creating and facilitating the process, working directly with CEO and other key functional leaders. In this role, I:
Worked with the other two leads and CEO to design and facilitate the process.
Concepted the planning framework and created an illustration to aid in socializing and explaining it to the company to ensure all team members felt engaged and understood the process as it unfolded.
Advocated for, then planned and facilitated workshop series that focused first on articulating strategic goals and then on engaging the entire company (150+ people) on ideation against those goals
Planned and facilitated synthesis and prioritization exercises with planning team, functional leaders, and CEO.
Worked with chief product officer to create 1H roadmap.
Timeline and Plan
Our goal was to have a plan for the entire company before Christmas. Starting in October, time was extremely tight on this planning process, so in many cases we were creating the next steps of the process days before implementing them.
Strategic and Functional Planning Framework
I created this illustration, which was used throughout the planning process in communications to the broader company, to explain to the company the overall framework we were using as well as how the different steps fit together. Everything below the vision is the process as designed and implemented by myself and the other two planning leads.
3yr Strategic Pillars, 1H 2019 Focus Areas and Objectives
Once the new CEO had shared his revised mission and vision with the company, the next step was to conduct a workshop to jump start the planning process. I planned and led a workshop with around 20 leaders from across the company to gather a cross-functional perspective. After a brief introduction and warm-up, the workshop had 3 activities that were designed to:
Establish shared context on the barriers that prevent people from receiving mental healthcare
Ideate on what the world will look like when we achieve our mission
Identify the milestones we’ll need to hit in order to get from current state to achieving the mission.
The activities were designed to build upon each other with large group share out sessions between a series of small group deep dives.
After the workshop, the other planning leads and I set to work synthesizing the above output (recreated from my raw notes) from the activities into 3 year strategic pillars and potential focus areas for 1H 2019. We met with the CEO to review our proposal for 2 cycles of additional iteration and then handed our final recommendation off to the CEO and chief of staff for final edits and word smithing. Below are final versions of one strategic pillar and one focus area and nested objectives as presented to the company.
Initiative Ideation Workshops
It was important to the CEO that the entire company be included in the planning process, so I designed a workshop series that engaged all 150+ team members in ideating potential initiatives, using the focus areas and objectives as framing. We sent a survey to the entire company, asking each participant to rank their relative interest in contributing ideas to each of the 1H 2019 objectives and then assigned them to workshops and groups accordingly. Over 4 days, we held 8 in-person workshops in NYC, Seattle, and remotely.
In small groups, participants first brainstormed initiatives that fit under their assigned focus area and objective, then grouped and voted on the ideas they thought would have the most impact in 1H. The second activity was a deep dive on the top 2-3 voted initiatives. Worksheets (below) were provided to help with collection and synthesis of the initiatives. We also created a standalone initiative idea form for people to submit additional ideas.
Initiative Synthesis, Sizing, and Prioritization
Through the ideation workshops and the form, we collected roughly 125 initiative and over 300 project ideas from across the company that all laddered up to one of the focus area objectives. From there, I led a synthesis exercise to identify a draft set of initiatives. The draft initiatives were shared with functional leaders and rounded out with the addition of existing commitments to create a complete list of roughly 50 initiatives and almost 200 potential projects under those.
Next the CEO completed a rough prioritization of the initiatives, bucketing them into “Must have,” “Nice to have,” and “Do later” which helped us whittle the list down in order to allow the design, product, and engineering teams to complete a sizing exercise and map any major dependencies between initiatives that would impact sequencing. I then facilitated a second prioritization exercise with the CEO and CPO, framed around the users within the Quartet ecosystem (patient, primary care provider, mental health provider, and internal users) and using the roughly sized projects to help them visualize what was possible to accomplish by the end of the year and what tradeoffs were necessary.
The CEO then took one final pass at the list of initiatives before finalizing and sharing them with the company.
RACI and Roadmapping
Some of the initiatives and projects as shared at company meeting in late November:
We then used a RACI matrix to map level of involvement of each department and department heads indicated which team member should be involved in each project. This information was used to determine delivery leads for initiatives, who collaborated with their teams to set specific OKRs and finalize projects within their initiative to ensure those OKRs would be achieved.
I created a combined product and operations roadmap which was presented to the board of directors in January, and worked with the CPO, PMs, and designers to create a more detailed product roadmap that was used in communications with the rest of the company.
