313. Miro 🪴
Strategy & planning templates for the start of a new quarter
Hi there 👋
Last week’s email was all about Notion templates, and this week’s email is all about Miro templates. I promise this is not becoming a Free Templates newsletter (although that might not be the worst thing in the world … I quite like to see other people’s templates.) In the natural rhythms of startup marketing, there tend to be seasons of planning and prep that happen right around the start of a new quarter, and it just so happens that Q2 planning has sent me into a template whirlwind.
Do you have any valuable templates in Notion, Miro, or other tools? I’d love to take a look.
Wishing you a great week ahead,
Kevan
(ᵔᴥᵔ)
Thank you for being part of this newsletter. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world and my time at Oyster, Buffer, and more.
Say hi anytime at hello@kevanlee.com. I’d love to hear from you.
The only three Miro templates you need for quarterly planning
It should probably be said that you don’t need any Miro templates for quarterly planning. My teams have gotten by without them for many quarters and been just fine. But …
if you’re working in quarters, you’ll need to plan
if you’re building a team with a foundation of trust, respect, and collaboration, you’ll want your team’s input
if you’re working remotely, you’ll need an asynchronous, collaborative place to plan together
That’s where Miro comes in. Or Google Docs. Or FigJam. Or your favorite collaborative tool of choice. We are a Miro / GDocs company at Oyster, so I’ve done my best to embrace these tools as part of our planning process.
I’m still getting there. For instance, some of the Miro boards below are very much a version 1.0 that my team (bless them) have been dogfooding with me. Everything can always be improved.
And if you get a chance to try out any of these templates below, I’d love your feedback.
So without further ado, here are three templates that we’ll be trying out as an Oyster marketing team this quarter, hoping to bring some asynchronous collaboration into making an awesome plan for Q2 and beyond.
1. Start with a retro
Here already is the first instance of doing what I say, not what I do. This retrospective step may need to follow the project planning step (#2) because you typically begin your project planning before you’ve completed the previous quarter. And it’s hard to run a retrospective on something that hasn’t finished yet.
The intention of a retro is to make a concerted effort to learn from your past work. It’s all too easy in a fast-moving environment to wrap up a project and move on to the next one. But is a project ever truly wrapped if you haven’t taken the time to learn from it?
This simple retro template takes the form of an “I Like / I Wish / I Wonder” exercise.
I Like: What went well?
I Wish: What could’ve gone better?
I Wonder: New ideas, what-ifs, unanswered questions
You then take these learnings from the Like / Wish / Wonder exercise and identify any consistent themes across each category.
Finally, you come up with a series of action items and assign owners to followup on next steps.
2. Plan your projects
At Oyster, we run an OKR process to align all the different teams within our company. We set company-level OKRs and team-level OKRs (e.g. marketing team). Our project planning is an extension of this OKR process as it contains the specific activities we commit to undertake in order to achieve our OKRs.
(It should be noted that key projects denote an ad hoc, time-bound, cross-functional activity that happens during a given quarter. In addition, our marketing team has always-on workstreams and channels that make up a huge portion of our ability to achieve our OKRs. For instance, paid search is a huge workstream of growth marketing that might not be evident in a project plan but will absolutely, definitely be a priority nonetheless.)
Here’s the Miro template you can use.
Step one: Brainstorm any new Key Results you may need to focus on this quarter.
Typically your Objectives will remain the same throughout a given year, but there’s opportunity to adapt and evolve the Key Results (if needed). Hopefully this is a relatively light process, but it’s useful to allow space for the team to identify any new needs. After all, your projects will be directly influenced by the goals you set.
Step two: Brainstorm projects.
These first two steps (goal and project brainstorms) can happen asynchronously and, frankly, benefit from an async day or two for people to bring great ideas, to comment on each other’s ideas, and upvote favorites. After a couple of days, some key themes and trends are likely to emerge, which you can then carry forward into the remaining process.
Steps three through five:
Scope your projects according to the Impact they may have and the Effort it will take to do them
Align your projects to your OKRs, making sure that you feel confident that you’ve chosen the right ones to achieve your goals
Finalize them with deadlines and owners
3. Align your teams
A new exercise we’ll be trying this coming quarter is putting together team charters for the various functions within marketing, e.g. brand marketing, growth marketing, etc. If you’re unfamiliar with team charters, here’s a good article from Medium and one from Monday.com. Essentially what we’re hoping to do is add clarity to what each team owns and how each team works together.
There are lots of ways to create team charters. Here’s the way I’ve built our template:
Ours may lean heavier into the Areas of Ownership and KPIs / Targets than other charters that you encounter. This is because we want to make sure that we have clear swimlanes for each team as we scale, which will help those teams move faster and for us to have a better sense of how to collaborate across all the different functions.
Your templates here
Got any great planning templates you’ve used before? I’d love to see them!
Misc.
How to increase product adoption using behavioral science.
Advice for women in tech. Great list of advice curated by the team at Open View Ventures. Example:
“You should have three types of mentors. You should have a mentor who is a technical expert on whatever it is that you’re doing. Whatever your role is, from a technical perspective, find someone who’s an expert on that. The second one is to find mentors who look like you so that you can get real feedback from them and advice from them that will resonate with you. Go find mentors that have the same intersections and identities as you. The third is to have mentors that are where you want to be. Success leaves clues. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Learn from people’s successes, but also learn from people’s failures.”
Trier Bryant, Co-Founder and CEO of Just Work
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Oyster (we’re hiring!). I previously built brands at Buffer, Vox, and Polly. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
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