Back to Best Of

This week in pm-clinic: Plan for the plan

This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum– Plan for the plan:

I work at a near v1 release start-up – we’re mostly industry vets who’ve worked together before, but we’re growing fast (7 new hires in the last month – 20% of our staff).

Some of us feel we need to write down something about how we do what we do – style guide for code, an outline for how feature decisions get made, you know – high level process stuff. It can be short and sweet, but we need a reference point.

Others feel it’s a waste of time, it never helps, and we should just be figuring it out as we go. No need to be all goody-too-shoes and orderly: we’re smart enough, as a small org, to work tight without documenting foofy things like processes.

How do you know when you need a plan for the plan? Who should write it? And how do you do it, especially for small anti-process teams, so that it’s beneficial in some way?

– Considering a plan for the plan