Contributed by Lisa Larson-Kelley, President & CEO
Every year around now I open a blank doc called "202x Plan" and feel the same urge: I want to jump right into crafting our new offers, setting our revenue target, filling up the calendar with our launches and events we’ll attend. It's the fun part. It's also the part that sounds exciting in January, but by April I’m feeling pretty naive.
After fifteen years running Quantious, I've learned to ‘eat the frog’ first… I look back before looking forward. I compress this into just 20 minutes, and keep it simple.
Here's the exercise, why it works, and what I discovered when I ran it on my own firm’s marketing this year.
Our 20 minute EOY look-back exercise
Step one: List everything you shipped.
Every launch, every campaign, every initiative that the team worked on in 2026. Don't curate! (If you are tempted to leave one out, that most likely tells you it’s one you should pay attention to.)
Step two: Flag what didn’t work.
Flag the ones that went out late, went over budget, or delivered less than you projected. Be honest about "less than you projected." Even hitting 75% of your projection is officially a miss and deserves attention.
Step three: Next to each miss, write one word: Process, Strategy, or Execution.
Process: i.e. nobody owned a handoff, we built the plan on assumptions nobody had checked, success was never defined, so we couldn't agree later whether we'd succeeded.
Strategy: i.e. we weren't aligned on what we were doing or why. Sales, marketing, and the website were telling slightly different stories. Teams were measured on different outcomes.
Execution: i.e. we knew what to do and who owned it, and we ran out of time, hands, or budget. The creative team wasn’t the right creative team. The product shipped before the GTM motion was ready.
Don’t convene a committee for this exercise; go with your gut. If you're torn between two words, pick the one that happened first in the timeline.
Step four: Tally. Which word shows up most often?
That needs to be the very first thing in your new year’s plan. If you don’t address that area of friction, you’re setting yourself up to repeat your failures.
You’ve got your one word, now what?
If it's Process, your plan starts upstream. Some possibilities:
Refresh your personas against what customers actually said this year, not what the research from 2024 says.
Define what "launch-ready" means before you kick off.
Put a single name, not a team, next to every decision a launch requires. (For more on this, see the AC Decision Chart from our Launch Alignment Toolkit: one person Accountable, the people they Consult before deciding, and nobody else.)
If it's Strategy, your 2027 plan starts with alignment. Things to try:
Create one positioning document everyone can find.
Perform the "logo swap" test on your messaging: if a competitor could put their name on it and it would still be true, it isn't differentiated yet.
Set KPIs across sales, marketing, and product that point at the same outcome instead of competing ones.
If it's Execution, and you've checked that it really is Execution, your plan starts with capacity and tiering.
Not every launch is a Tier 1. Treating them all as high priority is how you burn out your team.
Create playbooks for your tiered launches, so your teams can be focused on delivery, not spending time navigating ambiguity.
Decide what your contingencies are when a date slips (because one will).
What I found when I ran it on Quantious’ marketing
My word this year was Strategy.
Looking back across the year, the launches and campaigns that came up short were built on a picture of our clients that didn’t keep up with the transformation that’s been happening. AI has changed what client teams need from an outside marketing firm, where our expertise matters most, and how the work gets done, and our positioning hadn't fully caught up. We had been focusing all of our efforts on partnering with PMM leaders, without realizing that the pain points we had always been able to resolve for them had radically changed.
So page one of our new year’s plan is not jumping to craft a new offer. It's to spend time building a refreshed picture of who we serve and what's slowing them down. Once we have that foundation, we can start building our initiatives and messaging around that.
Try it yourself and see what you uncover
Block off twenty minutes this week to take a hard look at your year. Pour yourself a cup of tea, coffee (or a scotch, as I did), and dig deep. You may be surprised at what you find - but better to be surprised now than in July!
If you want the long version of this exercise, the Friction Map in our Launch Alignment Toolkit walks through all six focus areas with a pre-mortem prompt for each, and the Friction-to-Impact Matrix and AC Decision Chart take you from "here's what broke" to "here's who's fixing it first."
And if you run the look-back and want to compare notes, reply to the email this came from, or find me on LinkedIn. I'm curious whether Strategy is the word for most teams heading into 2027, or just for us.
