The Annual Planning Template (And How to Fill It In)

Most annual planning templates fail in the same way: they have too many fields, so teams fill them all in, and the result is a twelve-page document nobody reads and nothing to argue about.

A good annual plan fits on one page. If it needs more, the decisions haven't been made yet — length is usually a symptom of unresolved disagreement, not thoroughness.

Here is the template, field by field, with what a good answer actually looks like.

The one-page plan

COMPANY: ____________________          YEAR: ________

NORTH STAR
The one number: _______________________________
  Current: ________   Target: ________   Owner: ________

PRIORITIES (3–5, no more)
1. ______________________  Owner: ______  Measure: ______  Q1 checkpoint: ______
2. ______________________  Owner: ______  Measure: ______  Q1 checkpoint: ______
3. ______________________  Owner: ______  Measure: ______  Q1 checkpoint: ______

WE ARE EXPLICITLY NOT DOING
- ______________________________________
- ______________________________________

KNOWN RISKS
1. ______________________  Owner: ______  Early warning sign: ______
2. ______________________  Owner: ______  Early warning sign: ______

REVIEW DATES
Q1: ______   Q2: ______   Q3: ______   Q4: ______

That is the whole thing. Every field below earns its place.

North Star — the one number

What good looks like: a single number, currently measurable, that the company agrees defines a successful year.

What bad looks like: three numbers. A number nobody currently measures. A number that is really a project ("launch the platform"). A number so lagging that you'd learn nothing until December.

The test: if this number moves and nothing else does, was the year a success? If the honest answer is no, it isn't your North Star.

Current and target both matter. A target without a current value is a wish, and it also quietly reveals whether you can measure the thing at all.

Priorities — three to five

What good looks like: things that, if they happen, plausibly move the North Star. Phrased as outcomes, not activities.

What bad looks like: eight priorities. Departmental wish lists collected and stapled. Anything phrased as "continue to…" — continuing is not a priority, it is the baseline.

The arithmetic test. For each priority, ask: how much of the gap between current and target does this close? If the three to five priorities don't plausibly add up to the target, either the target is wrong or you are missing a priority. This is the single most valuable ten minutes in the planning process and almost nobody spends it.

Owner is a person. Not a department, not two people. "Marketing owns this" is how a priority quietly fails — see the planning workshop guide for why this one is worth being rigid about.

Measure must be true or false at year end. "Improve onboarding" is not a measure. "40% of new accounts reach activation within 7 days" is.

Q1 checkpoint is a date, not a quarter. Something visible must exist by then.

We are explicitly not doing — the field everyone deletes

This is the highest-value field on the page and the one most templates omit.

What good looks like: things that were genuinely considered and cut. Ideally things somebody in the room advocated for.

What bad looks like: an empty box, or three items nobody ever wanted to do anyway.

An empty not-doing list means nothing was traded away, which means you don't have a priority list — you have a wish list with numbers on it. And without the cut written down, cut items get quietly re-adopted by individuals over the following quarter, which is how teams end up delivering twelve priorities nobody agreed to.

Known risks — with an early warning sign

What good looks like: two or three risks, each with an owner and, crucially, an observable early warning sign.

What bad looks like: a generic risk register. "Market conditions" is not a risk you can act on.

The early-warning field is what makes this useful. "Hiring is slower than planned" is a risk; "we are two weeks past the target start date for the second engineer" is a signal you would actually notice. Run a pre-mortem to generate these — it produces better risks than asking for risks directly.

Review dates — booked now

Four dates, in calendars, before anyone leaves the room.

"We'll review quarterly" means you will review twice and then stop. Dates booked in October survive; intentions do not.

The three fields teams get wrong

1. Too many priorities. Five is the ceiling, not the target. Every priority beyond five dilutes the others and quietly makes the whole list optional.

2. Measures that can't be computed. Ask who computes each measure and from what source. If the answer requires a bespoke analysis, it will not be checked, and an unchecked measure is decoration.

3. The plan stops at company level. The template above is the company page. It needs to cascade — team measures, then individual measures and job descriptions that match. That cascade is where plans usually die, and it is a month of manager-by-manager work, not an afternoon. See company, department and individual KPIs.

When to fill it in

Not in December. The annual planning calendar sets out the full ten-week sequence — the short version is that the session that fills in this template should happen in October for a January fiscal year, leaving November for the cascade.

Getting it filled in properly

The template is easy. Agreeing the North Star is not, and neither is the cascade underneath it — those are the two places teams stall.

If you'd rather not facilitate that yourself, we run a free planning workshop that produces exactly this page with you, plus the KPI structure underneath it.