Annie Pearl: commitment

Transcript context

…That's an awesome example. I want to get back to the growth stuff, but before I do that, we're kind of on this topic of planning and a cares and prioritization. I'd love to know just how you do planning at Calendly? How far out do you plan in detail? How far do you have roadmaps? How often do you plan? Anything you can share there? This starts again, I sound like a broken record, but with this really clear strategy around where we're going over the next couple of years and then we take that and we break that down into what are the most important things we need to do as a company this year in order to be able to make the right progress against that strategy. So, we have the company level OKRs and I mentioned that we have about three of those this year. And then, those KRs within the company, OKRs are measured annually, but we have milestones across a quarterly basis so we can measure progress more frequently than obviously on the annual or semi-annual basis. So, I think that's kind of at the high level. And then, obviously our product roadmaps are going to be in support of those key results that we needed to deliver to the business over the course of the year, but then broken down on a quarterly basis. I think one thing I'll just touch on real fast on is estimations and dates. Something we've done over the last year is really kind of moved to a model of talking about dates and promising and committing to dates that are within our control. And so, if you think about the product development life cycle, we can commit to a discovery effort of doing research around a certain problem space and we can have a general sense of when we know that effort's going to conclude. We don't know if we're going to actually end up going, and based on the results whether we're going to actually move forward with investing in that area, but that's a body of work we can commit to. From there, we then move into, "Okay, if this is something a problem space we want to go after, we're going to go work on a couple different solutions and we're going to go do some user testing and we're going to land on a solution," and that's another sort of phase we can commit to. Then, once we actually have that completed and we actually know not just the problem but the solution, we can do estimation planning and actually have a date for delivery from an engineering perspective. And so, we've gotten a lot better at making the commitments around the work that's right in front of us versus making a commitment around a project six months out when we haven't even done enough discovery, enough design and ideation to have a real clear understanding of estimation. That is really cool. Do you have terms for these phases, like these phases you have to get through these kinds of gates? Yeah, how do you describe that?…

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