The following template is designed to be a lightweight annual (or quarterly) planning workshop.

It contains 6 sections which can be organized into 3 themes:

1. Reflection
2. Review
3. Planning

The first 2 sections of the workshop are intended to facilitate an honest reflection on where the business/product is at and how it's performed over the past 12 months (or quarter).

To facilitate this the workshop starts with a SWOT analysis: what have been our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. 

Followed by brainstorming a 'issue list' of all the current issues and challenges you're facing.

You can use different activities if you wish. The intent is to honestly reflect on what's been working vs what hasn't so that you can continually improve and adapt.

After looking back, we now need to look forwards.

The next 3 sections in the annual planning template is focused on reviewing your long-term vision, product strategy and roadmap.

These sections should be pre-filled as the intent is not to create them in the workshop but to review them.

- is the vision still valid? 
- do we need to make adjustments to our strategy based on what's working vs not?
- does our roadmap need to change?

Note: if you don't have a strategy or roadmap, you can definitely use this moment to create one - you need it otherwise, what are you planning towards? - but note that this will take some time and what you're likely to come out with is a draft, lightweight version of a strategy, not the final thing.

Finally now that we're re-aligned ourselves to long-term strategy and we've reflected on what's working vs not. Now we can finally plan.

To start, we begin with the goals and outcomes we want to achieve. Based on our strategy, roadmap and the challenges we're currently facing what goals should we have for this year (or quarter)? 

From there we need to prioritize and decide what we're actually going to do - there will always be more goals than we can realistically achieve.

Once you've focused in on 1-5 goals for the year (less if you're a small team) now it's time to plan them out.

To do this we will break each goal down into quarterly milestones (if you're using this template to plan quarterly, this should be monthly milestones).

This way your plan which by nature will be very activity and output focused is still grounded in outcomes - since everything has been worked backwards from your vision -> strategy -> goals -> outcomes -> milestones.