session · discovery & direction
Direction setting
Quarterly. Leadership + PO + Tech Lead in a room. Vision and goals are re-read. New direction signals are weighed. No initiative is born or killed in this session. Direction sets the field on which initiatives are later judged.
When
- Quarterly, ideally two weeks before the Quarterly portfolio review. Direction first, then portfolio decisions.
- Whenever a strong signal threatens the current direction — a market shift, a major client change, a falsified strategic bet. The session is called explicitly, not scheduled into existence.
Who
- Leadership — owns the bet.
- PO — translates the chain's evidence into direction-relevant signals.
- Tech Lead — translates the chain's technical reality into direction-relevant signals.
Time-box
Two hours. Long enough to walk the artefacts; short enough to force priorities.
Inputs
- The current Vision/Mission artefact.
- The current Goals & Objectives — with progress notes.
- The last quarter's signal readings and model updates (aggregated).
- The last quarter's chain-level distribution from the bug tracker.
Agenda
| Time | What |
|---|---|
| 0–15 min | Re-read Vision and Mission aloud. Are these still falsifiable claims we'd defend? If the language no longer fits the team's actual work, that is itself a finding. |
| 15–45 min | Walk each Goal. Progress vs target. "This goal: still load-bearing? Still measurable? Still the right number?" Edits are made on the artefact, in place. |
| 45–75 min | Read aggregated signals. What did the team learn this quarter about the world? Which assumptions have shifted? Which named persons' situations changed? |
| 75–105 min | Direction adjustments. Three forms: (1) sharpen the current direction; (2) retire a goal that has been met or has decayed; (3) add a goal forced by new signal. |
| 105–120 min | Write the changes. Vision/Mission/Goals edited in place. Signed and dated. |
Outputs
- Updated Vision / Mission / Goals — edited in source, not in a meeting note. The artefact carries the change forward.
- A one-page direction note — what changed this quarter and why. Read by the team and the client; archived next to prior quarters.
What good looks like
The session edits a small number of words in load-bearing places — and the team can feel the change in the next initiative kickoff. "Last quarter we said the goal was time saved; this quarter we sharpened it to time-saved-without-trust-cost. The next brief's prediction got tighter as a result."
A good direction-setting session closes one goal at least as often as it adds one. The goal-list does not accumulate; it cycles.
Anti-pattern
The session becomes a strategy off-site — long, abstract, slide-driven, producing a deck nobody reads. Fix: the session edits the live artefacts. If no artefact changed, the session did not happen.
A second anti-pattern: deciding scope. Initiatives are killed and funded at Quarterly portfolio review, not here. Direction is the field; portfolio is the moves on the field.
See also
- Canon — Why We Build · Before We Build · Direction
- Areas — Vision & Mission · Goals & Objectives
- Adjacent session — Quarterly portfolio review (downstream, two weeks later)