C · Value judgment and direction setting

Planning

Monthly, quarterly, and yearly plans, including what not to do.

Classification boundary

Include: Include turning direction into monthly, quarterly, or yearly goals, assumptions, phases, and explicit exclusions.

Choose a neighboring leaf when: Use prioritization to choose what comes first and D project/PMO for cross-team delivery tracking.

This capability may appear in standards across different stages. Explore stage expectations

26 questions

Choose a group based on the evidence you need. Groups follow existing question formats, not difficulty or mandatory prerequisites. Each batch has up to eight questions.

Judgment and options26

Compare goals, constraints, options, and trade-offs.

Questions 1–8

The annual conversion target depends on an untested channel assumption. How would you separate current commitments, assumptions to validate, and checkpoints for continuing, changing, or stopping?
The team needs months to build shared data capability, but the near-term roadmap shows no direct feature output. How would you express value, milestones, and exit criteria?
The company's funding lasts about 12 months, the key capability you need takes roughly 18 months to grow, and the market window has only 6 months left. How does your plan handle these unsynchronized time scales?
When planning the next six months, do you work forward from your resources and current state, or backward from the goal? Do the two give the same conclusion?
Your quarterly plan leaves out several important items. How do you record them so that when someone wants to revisit one later, the discussion rests on the judgment rather than re-arguing how important it is?
How do you confirm that your team's goals are consistent with the company's strategic goals? When they are not, do you adjust the team's goals or try to influence the goals above?
If you had to plan a technical direction over three to five years, how would you do it? How do you keep it from becoming a vision list that cannot be tested?
The company’s growth is slowing, and your manager asks you to explore an unfamiliar, highly competitive market with a limited budget. What would you learn and test in the first 30 days, and what evidence would determine whether to continue or stop?

Questions 9–16

A platform has migration, reliability, and productivity workstreams, but annual capacity supports only two. How would you sequence and trade off the quarters?
A team plans to end support for an old technology, but critical systems still depend on it and replacement is expensive. How would you create a retirement roadmap?
Policy and procurement cycles in a new market are unclear, yet the company must set annual goals and budgets. How would you translate long-term direction into quarterly hypotheses, validation milestones, and triggers for adjusting the plan?
The team plans to pilot a service in three cities, but supply quality, repeat use, and unit economics are unproven; sales materials already show a firm expansion timeline. How would you rewrite stage goals and external commitments?
The same product has different technical debt, release cadence, and user behavior on iOS, Android, and web; the roadmap still schedules uniform feature milestones, leaving one platform early and another far behind. How would you plan across platforms and define consistency boundaries?
The company sets an annual revenue target, while teams control only parts of product features, channels, or service capacity; quarter-end reviews often dispute attribution. How would you build a goal tree, dependencies, and team-controllable outcome measures?
The roadmap lists many goals but no explicit exits; each new request is added on top, and commitments keep changing. How would you include stopped, deferred, and declined work in planning governance?
The team releases monthly, and the business wants weekly releases, but automated testing, rollback, and monitoring are immature. How would you plan release capability without using deployment frequency as the only success measure?

Questions 17–24

Sales promised a customer a feature, but the roadmap has no capacity and the dependency team has not scheduled it. How would you handle expectations and internal decisions?
Mid-quarter market rules change, invalidating some assumptions behind the original goals. How would you reassess goals, invested resources, and irreversible commitments, then decide what to keep, change, or stop?
The annual goals are retention and margin, but teams pursue them through deeper discounts and reduced service investment. How would you turn the direction into comparable assumptions, constraints, and quarterly decision points?
The team sees three opportunities, each requiring cross-functional effort with unknown odds of success. How would you compare information value, validation cost, and the cost of missing a window?
A strategic outcome depends on product, legal, data, and delivery teams in sequence. Everyone agrees with the direction, but the plan contains only a final date. How would you define dependencies, decision points, and replanning rules?
Marketing channels, product activation, and sales follow-up each set conversion goals with different denominators and time windows. How would you align planning interfaces and expose dependencies?
A budget freeze leaves only 60% of planned capacity, but leadership resists changing goals. How would you distinguish baseline commitments, conditional commitments, and scope choices?
A small pilot met its target, but expansion across regions adds compliance, training, and support costs. What evidence should be required before committing it to the roadmap?

Questions 25–26

The team wants to reduce customer wait time this quarter, but historical data is incomplete and regions measure time differently. How would you establish comparable starting data and set a goal that can be recalibrated as you learn?
One option improves retention for existing customers; another opens a new market. Leadership is split. How would you document assumptions, opportunity cost, and conditions for reopening the decision?

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