Introducing the Plan of Record (PoR)
This series captures the story of how we created the PoR prioritization process to make better business decisions about how to align resources to serve customers and achieve company goals. I’m writing it down because the challenges product development teams face at SaaS companies are remarkably universal. They’re not just about technology — they’re about how humans work together to get things done when resources are constrained.
My evidence? I’ve implemented the PoR prioritization process three times across three different companies over a six-year span. In every case, the underlying challenges — both human and technical — were strikingly similar. And each time, the PoR helped reduce chaos, bring sanity to the work, and enable better decisions across the business.
The benefits for product management, engineering, and other technical teams have been tremendous. But I believe the biggest benefit is for the business as a whole. The PoR creates alignment between goals and resources in a way that best serves customers and advances the company’s growth strategy.
This framework is designed specifically for modern software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies. To make it more concrete, imagine you’ve just joined a SaaS business as the new Chief Product Officer, Chief Technology Officer, or perhaps as CPTO. The company has been around for a while. It has a strong customer base and a solid (if unspectacular) gross renewal rate. Growth is coming from a mix of new customer acquisition and upsells — but it’s not hitting the Board’s expectations for maximizing shareholder value.
In short, the business is doing reasonably well, but it could do better. You’ll need improvements across renewal, new business, and upsell performance to get there. Meanwhile, there’s pressure to be profitable — maybe even cash flow positive — to hit that “Rule of 40” target, which means resources are always tight.
Your R&D team is relatively strong and structured around cross-functional teams that support multiple product lines. But the CEO and executive team feel the team is under-delivering. There are recurring stability issues, performance problems being escalated from support, and obvious challenges with technical debt. You know the platform needs modernization, but your team is already underwater — stretched thin, overworked, and stuck in a “best efforts” mindset when it comes to delivery.
You’re seeing all the signs that the business urgently needs a better framework for prioritizing constrained resources. You’ve been here before. You know that putting the PoR in place will improve decision making and focus your limited R&D capacity on the work that has the greatest impact on company goals. It’ll take work — and time — but you know it’s worth it.
The PoR has the potential to become the operating system for your business. It translates high-level business goals into clear, actionable decisions about how to deploy a complex mix of technical resources. And it scales decision making at every level of the organization. At its core, it’s a simple, human concept — one everyone can understand and use.
The payoff? Your R&D investments start delivering predictable results. When the team commits, it delivers. But there’s a price: the business has to let go of magical thinking. No more banking on heroics or miracles. Prioritization means saying no to some things — or at least not now.
What has impressed me most about the PoR process — across all three companies — is how it consistently shifts the mindset toward commitment while also increasing autonomy, purpose, and mastery. Daniel Pink describes these as the three drivers of motivation in his book Drive, and I’ve seen them come to life when PoR is implemented in tandem with a trust-based culture. If the team feels safe even in the face of tough decisions, engagement can reach extraordinary levels.
Up Next: In the next post, we’ll get practical. I’ll walk through the symptoms you should be watching for — and offer some suggestions for how to diagnose the real root of the problem.