Hello there! Author there, and surprised/delighted with the response. I don't think we had the issue with the cadence, the quarter is arbitrary, but we think it gives us the ability to just go heads down to focus.
With that said, one thing we did and I don't why we did it was that we would "re-justify" why we would want to work on something every three months which isn't great. There is a world where if we had more eng. resources we could have more people than problems and we could take stuff on board as it arrives, but for us deciding on what to work on is a hard decision.
I also agree that market fit is a key factor. I think Railway was lucky that we didn't have to pivot the product 3 to 5 times to get some latch.
What would be the post-quarterty planning process that you would like to see?
> There is a world where if we had more eng. resources we could have more people than problems and we could take stuff on board as it arrives
I don't think this is a realistic world. The cavitation surface area that spawns new bubbles of unvetted fresh ideas grows as things are added. Adding eng resources to get more done makes it grow faster and I don't think there is ever such a thing as catching up.
tl;dr - deciding what to build (and what it looks like in detail) will always be a critical and fundamental function of product teams.
Deciding what to work on is critical as you say, every startup I see have at least 10x the things they want to do compared to the number of people.
But you're working in a pretty well known area. You don't really need planning for all 1000ish people as you could take this well known area and divide it into pieces that are largely independent. These pieces are either just table stakes where you need to be good enough but not innovate, or they're part of your vision for how to differentiate from other PaaS companies. You can budget accordingly and let these pieces do their own planning with their importance for the overall vision as context. (If you don't have a vision, your company is probably a mistake. Why are you even there?)
If there's an area where you don't need to innovate much, but you need to catch up, they might actually do a 3 month plan. If there's an area vital for your vision, they are probably trying new things, learning and re-targeting. Three months is far too long to plan for them on a tactical level, and probably too short to actually deliver on the vision.
You can certainly have a quarterly checkup or something to see that all parts are working from an upper management level, but the useful planning horizon varies by problem area, and they don't really need to plan in the same way.
With that said, one thing we did and I don't why we did it was that we would "re-justify" why we would want to work on something every three months which isn't great. There is a world where if we had more eng. resources we could have more people than problems and we could take stuff on board as it arrives, but for us deciding on what to work on is a hard decision.
I also agree that market fit is a key factor. I think Railway was lucky that we didn't have to pivot the product 3 to 5 times to get some latch.
What would be the post-quarterty planning process that you would like to see?