⏱️ Length
2–4 hours per team - plus prep and leadership syncs
Can span 1–2 days when done company-wide
🔁 Frequency
Once per quarter - typically two weeks before the quarter ends
🧑🤝🧑 Who Attends
- Team-level planning: Team leads + core contributors
- Cross-functional: Department heads + product/ops/finance leads
- Company-level: Leadership team
🎯 Purpose
To align on the team or company’s focus for the upcoming quarter.
It’s about committing to the right priorities, ensuring coordination across functions and surfacing key risks and dependencies early.
📋Agenda
- Review previous quarter: goals hit/missed, key learnings
- Discuss company-wide priorities or OKRs
- Department or team presentations: planned work, dependencies
- Prioritization discussions
- Finalize commitments and flag risks
- Wrap-up with next steps and owners
📍Format
Hybrid or in-person
Often includes a shared workspace (Notion, FigJam) for visibility and async prep
Can be split into smaller sessions (e.g. team first, leadership sync later)
🛠️ Tool Stack
- Docs/Prep: Notion, Google Docs
- Prioritization: Productboard, Trello, Linear
- Slides/Recaps: Google Slides
💡 Tips
- Send pre-reads in advance to keep sessions focused
- Timebox discussions — capture unresolved items for async follow-up
- Encourage radical candor in reviewing past performance
- Be transparent about what won’t get done
- Make space for bottom-up proposals, not just top-down alignment
- If remote: over-communicate outcomes and action items
Contributor: Team Slumpbeat