GIST stands for Goals, Ideas, Steps, and Tasks:
- Goals: Align with the objectives in OKRs.
- Ideas: All ideas we can test to achieve those goals.
- Steps: Validation methods to test our ideas, ending with recalculating priorities using ICE scores.
- Tasks: Team tasks to execute each step.
The system is called GIST after its main building blocks: Goals, Ideas, Step-projects, and Tasks. Each has a different planning horizon and frequency of change, and may use different tools to track, but together they constitute all the core planning any company and team needs to do.
Rethinking MVP
This form of planning is a ton of work — just getting all stakeholders to agree is a massive undertaking, yet ROI is very low. The plans quickly go out of sync with reality
The planning cycle
Planning with GIST is multi-tiered and iterative:
- Goals are typically set for an horizon of one or more years — this is where we want to encourage long-term thinking. They are defined at the beginning of the year and evaluated and adjusted every quarter — we don’t want to pursue stale goals.
- Ideas are constantly collected and prioritized. We never stop looking for new ideas.
- Step-projects are defined at the beginning of the quarter. The team picks the goals and ideas it wishes to pursue this quarter, and defines step-projects accordingly. The quarterly step-project list (typically stored in a spreadsheet or database tool) is evaluated and reprioritized every 1–2 weeks, in sync with task iterations planing.
- Tasks are planned in 1–2 week iterations in per the teams’ preferred dev method, for example Scrum sprint planning, and adjusted daily.
