My podcast this week is from the Continual Planning book. Enjoy!
If you do not see the podcast frame, either click through to the post, or the video link.
The Podcast:
The Transcript:
This is 60 Seconds of Writing in Public with Johanna Rothman for November 13, 2026 where I read an excerpt of just a minute of some writing in progress.
This is from the Continual Planning book.
Big Plans Include Hidden Assumptions
Many organizations create quarter-by-quarter plans for teams and products. Here are the hidden assumptions in those plans:
- The planners can predict the value of each of the feature sets for each product in advance.
- No new information will arrive during the quarter to prompt anyone to change their minds.
- Especially in a program, where several teams need to coordinate their work, that each feature set has an even distribution of features. That is, the feature sets for all the teams are roughly the same size.
Sometimes, these assumptions do hold. But those assumptions do not allow for frequent change.