Linear’s Post

I recently realized that annual planning doesn't work that well, meaning following a calendar year for your roadmap or planning. Boards often ask, "What is your plan for 2024?" My answer to this is what we are doing now and what comes next. The problem with calendar year planning is that there is rush to complete things before the year ends, but you cannot launch or beta test features as customers are not paying attention. Then when the team comes back from the end-of-year break, there is this momentum lost and they have to think about launching the features as well as picking up new projects from the 2024 roadmap. You effectively rush to do exactly nothing and lose all the momentum with the holiday break. What we do instead at Linear: We plan in the spring and fall, creating summer and winter roadmaps. We have noticed that this works well because in Jan the team can pick up the projects they were already working in the and finish them in Q1, which is also a great time to release new things. Then we do our next planning in spring, followed by our company-wide offsite in May to discuss it. Afterward, we put our heads down and work on these things until Sep-Oct, which is again a good time for releases, and then we head off to plan for the winter. We did our planning last fall, which we called "Execution Mode," where everything basically focused on 2 product initiatives, Planning and Discovery and now we are pretty much 80% done and ready to enter some beta stages.