Prerequisite 2 - Clarity of Goals
A Plan of Record is only as strong as the goals it’s built to serve
A Plan of Record (PoR) prioritization process doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s a tool for making hard decisions about limited resources—and those decisions must be guided by clear, ranked business goals.
For most SaaS businesses, those goals start with financial objectives: topline metrics like ARR growth (retention, upsell, and new bookings), and bottom-line metrics like profitability and cash flow. But financial metrics alone aren’t enough.
People don’t come to work motivated by ARR and EBITDA targets. They want to know why those targets matter.
Tie the Goals to the Mission
Great leadership connects the dots between the business’s mission and its financial imperatives. A cybersecurity company may aim to enable trust in an increasingly digital economy. A sustainability platform might aim to accelerate the transition to clean energy. These are missions that inspire.
When the PoR is rooted in these missions—and cascaded clearly into R&D objectives—teams feel aligned, empowered, and motivated.
Cascade the Goals into Actionable Objectives
The connecting tissue between the company’s high-level goals and the work inside your PoR is the set of R&D objectives that cascade down. These objectives must:
Translate ARR and profitability goals into technical, product, and engineering priorities
Exist at a level granular enough to guide specific project and resourcing decisions
Enable R&D leaders to make prioritization calls without escalating every trade-off
Without this cascade, the PoR loses its footing. Teams can’t connect their daily work to the company’s direction, and executives can’t rely on the PoR to drive outcomes.
Spend the Time—It Pays Off
In practice, this takes real collaboration—especially if your R&D functions (product, UX, engineering, research) report separately to the CEO. But the investment in shared goal-setting pays off. Teams work better when they’re clear on what matters most—and what can wait.
It’s important to make sure that your goals cover all of the aspects of work for the R&D team. It is very easy to create goals based on the delivery of roadmap items because they are so obvious to the business. But R&D teams for SaaS businesses include many different roles that contribute to the corporate goals in ways that are not always so obvious.
Spend the time to cascade goals in a way that includes all of the functions of your R&D team. For a typical SaaS business, your R&D teams will contribute to one or more of the following three, simple high level R&D categories:
building products and services (new products and features),
supporting products and services (firefighting, platform modernization, maintenance, bug fixes and technical support) and
delivering products and services (devops, infrastructure and infosec).
Then, you can help the team understand how building, supporting and delivering products and services contribute to the achievement of one or more of the three different categories of corporate goals:
revenue goals (retention, upsell and new),
profitability goals (cost of service and operating expense targets) and
operational goals (communications, reporting and process).
Up Next: In the next post, we’ll cover Customer-Centric Frameworks—a vital tool for ensuring your prioritized work actually delivers value to users.