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Q4 is knocking at the door — it’s time to start planning for 2025.

A few weeks ago, I shared annual planning tips from leaders in the PMM Camp community.

It was a hit, but many of you asked me to share the full-length process I used personally at Unbounce and Kajabi. Ask and you shall receive!

In today’s edition, I break down the 5-step process I’ve perfected over the years (and share my templates too!).

Happy planning.

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Annual Planning 101

Here’s my go-to process for building a comprehensive product marketing plan. Steal it and make it your own!

Team Brainstorm

A plan is only as good as your ability to execute on it. That’s why I build team buy-in from the very beginning. The worst thing you can do is present a fully locked in plan to your team and expect them to bring it to life.

The first step in my annual planning process is to collect the list of corporate priorities from the executive team. Usually, there are 3 to 5 main priorities the company is trying to tackle each year, and you want to ensure your team’s plan is laddering back up to these.

Once I have these corporate priorities, I build a Miro board that looks something like this image below. Create one of these tables for each of the corporate priorities you believe your team can support.

Use this Miro board to facilitate an interactive brainstorm session with your product marketing team. The goal is to identify a PMM team objective that supports the corporate priority, and then determine the right tactics and key results for that objective. At this point, there are no bad ideas. Encourage your team to be as creative as possible.

As the leader, it’s your responsibility to actually pull the plan together. Don’t feel pressure to decide on the final plan in this meeting — usually I’ll take this away and complete on my own.

Plan On A Page

I like to be able to have one artifact that allows me to see my team’s entire plan on one page. This makes it easy to share with stakeholders and reference throughout the year. In fact, I actually include this slide in all team meetings to anchor us back to our “why” for the year.

Here’s the slide I’ve been using for years:

It’s simple but effective. Again, I include the corporate priority as the starting point so it’s abundantly clear how we’re advancing the company’s goals. When you can connect these dots, it’s much easier to unlock budget, resourcing and support.

At this stage, you can present this high-level plan back up to the executive team and your leader to get final buy-in.

The Details

Now, onto the details of the plan. I like to preface this part by saying we don’t actually know what’s going to happen throughout the year. As a team, we need to be agile and fluid enough to adjust to market conditions, customer insights, and new trends and data.

BUT at a minimum we want to enter the year with a general sense of the initiatives we will prioritize to hit our team objectives and key results. These can be pulled from your initial team brainstorm, but you’ll probably find you need to have a second brainstorm now that your OKRs are firmed up.

Create a slide like this for each of your team objectives. I like to include a column for the Directly Responsible Individual (the accountable owner of the initiative on my team). This team member is then responsible for identifying the resources (core team) they’ll need for the initiative and preparing the project brief.

I revisit this list of tactics every quarter during our quarterly planning process to identify which initiatives need to be prioritized, de-prioritized or added.

OKR Dashboard

The last step of my annual planning process is to build an OKR dashboard to measure my team’s progress throughout the year.

Slot in the objectives and key results you’ve aligned on and break down the key results by quarterly targets. This is a great way for your team to know if you’re on track, or if the plan needs to be adjusted.

The tracker can be used as a conversation tool in team meetings to identify if you’re tracking red, yellow or green. Typically, I’ll prioritize discussing red and yellow items to get the team back on track.

Socialize with Stakeholders

If you’d like (I usually do), you can create an annual plan slide deck that includes your plan on a page slide as well as the individual slides for each objective.

The best part of having an organized plan with slides is that you now have a great artifact you can shop around to stakeholders.

What do you think? Do you have a go-to annual planning process you want to share with Campers? Hit reply and let me know. I’ll share it in the community!

CAMPER ESSENTIALS

📚 Reading List: PMM Camp is hosting a private book club with Emma Stratton to discuss her new book Make It Punchy. Head to the Bonfire tab of the community to RSVP and request your FREE copy of the book! (Not a member? We’re opening up new spots the week of October 15 — join the waitlist).

🎧 Playlist: Learn how to navigate the inbound and outbound divide in PMM on the newest episode of Product Marketing Life. Collin and I discuss the breakdown of each of these styles, and how to know which one fits you best.

🍕 Snacks: I am in love with my new Wonder Oven. Does it fulfill my childhood Easy Bake Oven dream? Absolutely. Can I roast a whole chicken while also recording a podcast? You bet. (I have it in Spice).

Now excuse me while I go make a batch of cookies.