How to Start Building Your PoR Prioritization Process
Getting your team - and your company - to adopt a commitment-based mindset
Now that we’ve defined the prerequisites for a Plan of Record (PoR), we’ll get practical and walk through how to actually build one. In the next four posts, we’ll walk through each of the four building blocks of implementation:
Collect all the work
Estimate capacity across teams
Prioritize work and build the PoR
Communicate with discipline and clarity
The purpose of the PoR is to help your business make better decisions about how to align your resources in order to achieve your goals and deliver on customer jobs. That’s why I believe every person who is hired into, or promoted into, a leadership role within an R&D organization at a SaaS company should invest time and energy upfront to build a PoR prioritization process. This includes product managers, engineering managers, and other technical leaders working in close collaboration as “drivers” — and ideally, it’s done with buy-in from the CEO and executive team.
Even if collaboration across functions is difficult or the R&D team is siloed, the important thing is to start — and to build your PoR with whatever scope is feasible. While it’s ideal for the PoR to operate across the entire organization, it can still dramatically improve focus and effectiveness even at smaller scopes. As we’ll discuss in later posts, the PoR is an operating system for leadership and decision-making.
Whether your target scope of implementation is small or large, you should expect a significant upfront investment in time and energy. The magnitude will depend on your organization’s current state and how much change management is required to shift the team’s mindset. If the dysfunction is obvious and your team sees the need for change, it may be easier to get initial buy-in — but even then, you’ll still need to guide people through the shift.
People will need help letting go of how things were done before, even if the old approach wasn’t working. Acknowledging the good intentions behind previous efforts can help create space for the new process. You’re not blaming the past; you’re saying the company has reached a stage where it needs a new approach in order to scale, improve efficiency, and deliver on commitments.
As a leader, your job is to paint the picture of how the PoR prioritization process will help the company make better decisions — while also increasing focus, flow, and joy for the team.