Step 4 - Initiate Your PoR Communication Practices
Build trust through clarity, consistency and transparency
When you start building your PoR, one of your most important jobs is communication.
You’re introducing a new way to prioritize and commit to work. This shift requires people to think differently — not just about what’s important, but about how decisions get made, how work is tracked, and how teams are held accountable.
Start With the Fundamentals
Early on, you’ll need to teach and reinforce some key principles:
A Plan of Record is persistent but not permanent
A PoR is designed to change when new information emerges
If something is added, something else must be removed (assuming constraints remain constant)
The PoR represents the best current alignment of resources with corporate goals
That last point is critical. The PoR is a mechanism for alignment — not just a list of projects. It helps the business make informed trade-offs in the face of constraints.
If Everything Is a Priority…
If your team has been working in best efforts mode, your initial communications need to break that pattern.
In best efforts mode, the R&D team is usually overwhelmed and demoralized. They’re working hard, but they’re not hitting expectations. The customer-facing teams are frustrated, because deliverables are late or unclear. The result is a cycle of burnout, mistrust, and missed goals.
Your first communication goal is to define what “commitment” means in the context of the PoR — and to build trust around that definition.
A Plan of Record enables commitment by clearly identifying:
What work is prioritized
What capacity is available
What timelines are realistic
The Engineering Team’s Perspective
Your engineers will be wary of the word “commitment.” They know that things change. Priorities shift. Estimates go wrong. Bugs appear out of nowhere. Promises made in good faith get derailed by new information.
That’s why you need to reinforce the idea that the PoR is designed to adapt. It’s not rigid. It’s not a promise that nothing will change. It’s a framework for communicating what’s most important — and for making intentional changes when the situation demands it.
But — and this is key — if a new item is added to the PoR, something else must be removed or delayed. Otherwise, it’s not a real prioritization.
The Executive Team’s Perspective
Executives and customer-facing teams want confidence in the roadmap. They’re managing external stakeholders — customers, investors, and the Board — and they need to be able to explain what’s coming and when.
To build that confidence, make a simple commitment: If something in the PoR is at risk of delay, communicate it early.
For example, if a feature scheduled for Q1 looks like it might slip, alert your go-to-market team 30 or 45 days in advance. That gives them time to reset expectations with customers and plan accordingly.
This kind of transparency builds trust.
Change Will Happen
You’ll also need to prepare everyone for change — not just slippage, but shifting priorities. New competitors emerge. Technology changes. Acquisitions happen. All of these things may require realignment.
The PoR helps you manage those changes, but it only works if the entire organization understands how the process works — and buys into it.
When evaluating a new initiative, the executive team will want to understand the “cost” — usually in terms of capacity. This is why your PoR team needs to get good at doing “quick take” estimates: rough calculations of the people and time needed to deliver on something new.
Communication Is the Work
You can’t over-communicate when rolling out a PoR. As Patrick Lencioni wrote in The Advantage, you need to repeat key messages until people groan. Then repeat them again.
The PoR is only useful if people understand what it is, how it works, and how to engage with it. When you reach that point, you’ve shifted your company from best efforts to commitment mode — with shared accountability and a much greater chance of delivering on what matters most.
Up next - In the next section, we’ll shift to the day-to-day operations of your PoR—including how to triage new, incoming work, hold effective PoR meetings, and manage the human side of change.