Rituals for hypergrowth: An inside look at how YouTube scaled

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Implementation

Sprint planning

An intentionally lightweight goal-setting process.

A key aspect of the YouTube model was that our deep strategy discussions would happen every six months as we did strategic planning. That meant that our “sprint planning” was intentionally very lightweight.

We did this process at YouTube in a very complex set of spreadsheets with a lot of appscript to try to simulate multiple editable views. The below template accomplishes a similar goal.

You can replicate this process for you team by clicking this button to

copy this doc

⁠

and then this button to

clear sample data

⁠

A few key notes:

Teams: To get started, add your

Teams⁠

into the table below.

Pro tip: This template is meant to be used standalone, but if you are using the

Matrix planning and allocation⁠

template as well, you can remap the Team column in Sprint Goals below to map to your list of Investment Areas

Goals: Each team then adds their

Sprint goals⁠

Note: Goals here were meant to be concrete and measurable. Because of the fast frequency, sometimes they will be intermediate milestones before a full ship or coordination milestones — "Team A will get X ready so that team B can do Y in the next sprint."

Pro tip: If you are also using the

Big Rock $100 prioritization⁠

, feel free to add a lookup column to Sprint Goals to track which Big Rocks they are associated with.

Dependencies: As part of filling in

Sprint goals⁠

, teams can indicate if a goal depends on another team.

The dependency model here is intentionally light. It is straightforward to add workflow — like asking for and accepting dependencies or adding the ability to depend on a specific goal — but I found it best to start with something much simpler and see if that is necessary.

Progress and scoring: As the sprint progresses, teams periodically update the progress for each goal in

Sprint goals⁠

Note that the colors flow through to the chips in the

Teams⁠

table which makes that a very digestible summary.

⁠

Sprint goals

Sprint goals

Goal

Team

Team(s) it's dependent on

Progress

Increase X by Y%

000

100

Get X ready so that we can do Y next sprint

000

100

Ship X feature

000

Increase X by Y%

000

100

Improve CSAT score by X%

000

$XX in ad spend

000

Ship X feature

000

100

Improve view time by X hours

000

Decrease buffer time by X%

000

Increase X by Y%

000

100

There are no rows in this table

⁠

Teams

Teams

Name

Team goals

Depdendencies

Team 1

Team 2

Team 3

Team 4

Team 5

There are no rows in this table

⁠

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