The Framework

Planning at Systeric nests on time. We zoom from a year down to a week, and at each level the horizon shortens and the commitment firms: the year sets the vision, the half sets the strategy, the quarter sets the plan, and the blocks and weeks underneath execute it. Every level takes a clear input, runs a process, and produces one output, and a cadence keeps it honest against reality.

This page is the map, and it comes first on purpose. It brings you through the whole story (where we’re going, and what each level is expected to produce): the what and why. The pages after it are the how: the methods that turn these horizons into a good strategy and a good plan. We walk you through the expectation first, then hand you the tools to meet it.

Why this section exists: we want the product team to act as the CEO of their area. A CEO owns the whole ladder: sets the vision, decides the strategy, makes the calls under scarcity, and answers for the result. Direction-setting isn’t a leadership-only skill reserved for the top of the org; here it’s the job. Everything below is what a CEO does with a year, a half, a quarter, and a week, and how they report on it.

The horizons at a glance#

Each level is an input → process → output, kept honest by a beat of the cadence:

Annual: the vision, bookended by a review#

The widest horizon sets a high-level vision: not a plan, a direction, the thing every half’s strategy has to ladder up to. It’s short, durable, and shouldn’t change every six months; if it does, it wasn’t a vision. At the far end of the year the same horizon closes with a year-in-review: an honest account of what actually happened against the vision, what moved, what stalled, what surprised us. That review is the richest single input into next year’s vision and the coming half’s diagnosis, which is why the annual horizon has two moments, not one: aim at the start, reckon at the close. See Annual Vision for how to create one and what good looks like.

Half: the strategy#

Six months is long enough to be genuinely strategic and short enough to truly commit to. The half takes the annual vision from above and the bottom-up two-pagers from below, runs the diagnosis, and converges on the strategy: roughly six Big Rocks tied to inputs, with a capacity budget behind them. This is the output most of this section teaches you to produce well: see Half Strategy.

Quarter: the plan#

The quarter is where strategy becomes executable. We deliberately don’t run a second, heavyweight quarterly strategy: the strategy is the half’s job. The quarter’s job is the plan: halfway through the half the checkpoint re-forecasts the rocks (reallocate, kill, or add), and the quarter’s plan says which rocks the next blocks will actually advance. Shorter horizon, firmer commitment, and a course-correction so a six-month plan never drifts a full half unchecked.

Block and week: execution#

Below planning sits the execution cadence: 4-week blocks taken as 100% commitments, two-week demos inside them, and the weekly operating beats. This is where the plan turns into shipped work: see Blocks & Sprints and the full Cadence.

How it cascades#

The horizons are not five separate rituals; they are one trickle-down, the same way OKRs cascade. Each level’s output is the next level’s input, so the line runs unbroken from the company’s vision to a person’s week:

vision (year) → the north star it implies → the half’s Big Rocks that move it → the quarter’s plan of which rocks the blocks advance → each block’s 100% commitments → the metric on a person’s weekly report

Two properties make that cascade worth having, and both are enforced, not hoped for:

• Accountability. Every level names one owner: a Rock Manager for a rock, a DRI for a goal, a person for a metric. And every level has a beat where that owner answers for their number: the weekly report and WBR, the monthly MBR, the quarterly checkpoint, the year-in-review. You can trace any number down to the one person moving it this week, and trace any person’s week back up to the vision. There are no shared, ownerless goals.
• Critical thinking, not inheritance. Trickle-down here does not mean orders handed down to be executed. At each level the owner does the thinking for their level: they run their own diagnosis, propose their own metric, pressure-test their rock against its 10x version, and name the secret. A goal you inherited without re-deriving is a goal you cannot defend when the data shifts. The point of pushing the work down is to push the thinking down to where the information actually is: the person closest to the problem.

That is the difference between a plan that is obeyed and a system that thinks at every level. The act-as-the-CEO expectation above is what makes it real: each owner treats their slice as their whole company.

How to tell the cascade is broken#

The cascade is the whole value of nesting on time, and it fails quietly: nobody announces that a link came loose, the meetings keep happening, and everyone stays busy. Four checks, each answerable in a minute.

Walk one metric upward. Take any number on any weekly report and ask what rock it moves, and which Big Rock that rock belongs to, and which part of the vision that rock serves. If the chain breaks at any step, you have found work that is running on inertia. It is not necessarily wrong work, but nobody decided it at a level that could weigh it against anything else.

Walk one rock downward. Take a Big Rock and ask whose week it shows up in. A rock that appears in nobody’s week this month is not being worked on, whatever its status says.

Name the owner out loud. For each level, ask who answers for this number at the next beat. If you get a team name rather than a person, or two different names from two people, the accountability property is not there. See DRI.

Check whether the beat produced a decision. A level whose review has not changed anything in two cycles is reporting, not steering. That is the most common failure and the hardest to see, because a well-run reporting meeting feels productive.

When it goes wrong, the repair is almost never another ritual. It is usually one of two things: a level whose output nobody downstream actually consumes, which should be cut rather than improved, or a rock without an owner who answers at a beat, which needs a name rather than a process.

Where this stops#

Three honest limits, because a framework presented without them invites people to apply it where it does not fit.

Some work has its own calendar and does not care about ours. Regulatory deadlines, a client’s fiscal year, a seasonal peak. Where an external clock exists, it wins, and the horizons have to be planned around it rather than the other way round. Forcing a compliance deadline to wait for the next half is how you miss it.

A half is too long when the ground is moving. Nesting on time assumes the world holds still enough for a six-month commitment to remain sensible. Early in a product’s life, or in the weeks after something breaks, it will not, and the honest response is a shorter cycle rather than a strategy everyone quietly stops believing.

It plans capacity, not attention. The framework is good at saying what we committed to and bad at protecting the conditions that make the commitment achievable. A block that is 100% committed on paper and interrupted daily is not a planning failure, and no amount of re-planning fixes it.

Review and report like a CEO#

A team that acts as the CEO reviews the business on a matching rhythm: a WBR each week, an MBR each month, a QBR each quarter, and an annual review. Each review pairs with a written report, the weekly report, the monthly investor update, the checkpoint memo, and the year-in-review. The review reads the metrics; the report is what comes out. See Operating Reviews for how each one runs, how the WBR and MBR translate to a product team, and the investor-update template.

Then: how to achieve it#

Everything above is the what and why, the story and the expectation. The rest of this section is the how, the methods that turn these horizons into a strategy and a plan worth committing to:

• Annual Vision: how to set the vision and what a good one looks like.
• North Star & Inputs: pick the one outcome you’re moving, and the inputs that drive it.
• Diagnosis: find where the leverage actually is, sized and evidenced.
• Bets: the direction-setting masterclass: propose, shape, filter and size bets, budget the half’s capacity, and turn each into an owned goal.
• Prioritization: the step after it: choose which of the surviving bets get built now, and prove the set adds up to the goal.
• Two-pagers: the bottom-up intake ritual that feeds half-planning.
• Half Strategy: the capstone, where all of the above converge into the outsized, end-first strategy doc, plus the checkpoint that keeps it live.

One illustrative business, an online store, runs through all of them with the same numbers, so you watch a strategy get built rather than read disconnected explanations.

One example across the horizons#

Each row is a zoom-in of the one above: the vision says where, the strategy says how this half, the plan says what now. Bring people through that story, then help them achieve it.

Related: Annual Vision, North Star & Inputs, Diagnosis, Bets, Half Strategy, Two-pagers, Operating Reviews, Cadence