As this year winds down, you may be eager to begin or continue planning for the next one. It’s an exciting time that’s filled with brainstorming, bold ideas, and big dreams as you and your team enthusiastically identify all of the possibilities for the coming year. But you also know that you need to balance all of that ambitious fantasizing with some intention, strategy, and organization.
Whether your team is remote, in-person, or a little bit of both, these Miro templates will help you and your team both establish your 2024 goals and collaborate seamlessly to achieve them.
Visioning
Before you put a single metric or target in writing, you and your team need the freedom to think without limitations about all of the things you could work toward in the next year. Use these templates to explore your most audacious ideas, while anchoring them within your team and company’s mission and values.
1. Stay focused on value
There are tons of different directions in which you could take your product, team, or company — but should you? This Product Vision Canvas template created by Merissa Silk drives alignment on your overarching vision.
This workshop walks you through nine different prompts, including your problem statement, target audience, needs, features, goals, experience principles, and more. When you and your team have worked through the entire thing, you’ll all have your sights set on the same horizon — so that you can then generate the ideas that will get you there.
2. Explore all possibilities
Brainstorming and visioning can be tough. While they’re supposed to support free-flowing ideas, it’s all too easy to get stuck in a specific lane or way of thinking. The How Might We template by RHNTC encourages your team to think outside of the box and approach ideas from all angles.
The template is built around one seemingly simple question: “How might we…?” You’ll list your desired improvement area at the top and then come up with potential avenues and suggestions in a number of different categories, such as best case scenarios, extreme ideas, ideas that are opposite of your aim, and ideas that challenge assumptions.
Strategic planning
A phrase like “strategic plan” is enough to make knowledge workers’ eyes roll. It sounds formal, stuffy, and — let’s be honest — a little daunting. In reality, your strategic plan is designed for one simple purpose: Setting your direction. The process doesn’t have to be intimidating or painful, especially if you use these templates.
3. Simplify your strategic plan
If you think of a strategic plan as a lengthy document filled with jargon and endless appendices, this Strategic Planning Board template by Targetprocess will challenge everything you think you know about the planning process.
This single-page canvas simplifies and streamlines your strategic plan. You’ll identify your ultimate objective at the top and continue to break it down into team and group objectives, activities, and features or user stories. It makes your entire strategic plan far more approachable, digestible, and actionable.
4. Create a strategy canvas
The Strategy Canvas template by mpath insight likewise challenges teams to go beyond the stiff and dense language of typical strategic plans and spell out your vision and direction in a far more accessible and useful way.
With this template, you set your challenge at the top and then move through the different phases to diagnose the situation, develop guidelines for decision-making, and establish specific actions to achieve your goals.
5. Understand the ins and outs of your strategy
The Strategy Explorer template by Dr. Stefan Pastuszka offers space to create a strategy on a single, easy-to-reference page. You’ll list your vision and mission, spell out situations and trends, complete a SWOT analysis, and identify action steps. It’s a collaborative canvas for hashing out your strategy, but also a great resource that people can easily return to when they need a refresher.
Goal setting and tracking
You’ve laid the foundation by aligning on your company’s vision and strategy. Now, you and your team are ready to get into goal-setting. These templates will help you set motivating and relevant targets — and take steps toward actually reaching them.
6. Host a goal-setting workshop
Whether the upcoming year is a blank slate for your team or you’ll be building on accomplishments and learnings from the previous 12 months, use this Company Goal-Setting Workshop template by Falon Dominguez, Business Operations Manager here at Miro, to host a session during which your team can set its annual objectives.
You’ll brainstorm objectives, rank them based on their importance, set metrics to monitor your success, and then create a final draft that highlights your three most important objectives, key results, and next steps.
7. Understand your anti-goals
When goal-setting, almost all of the focus is placed on what you want to achieve. As counterintuitive as it seems, identifying what you aren’t trying to do is also helpful. It helps you proactively manage scope creep and prevent projects or ambitions from snowballing out of control.
That’s exactly what this Goals and Anti-Goals template created by VMware Tanzu Labs challenges you to do. Of course, you’ll define the goals that will help your team be successful. Then, you’ll also spell out the things you are explicitly not aiming to do, so that you can avoid distractions and stay zoned in on your most pressing objectives.
8. Stay on track with OKRs
Setting your team’s goals is important — but it’s only the first step. You’ll also need to set action plans, milestones, and success metrics to help your team actually chase down and achieve those objectives.
Many large and successful companies use Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to identify not only the goal, but also the outcomes that will indicate if the team was successful or not. If you’ve previously been intimidated by OKRs, this Getting Started With Company OKRs template, also by Falon Dominguez, will help you tackle the process in an intuitive and systematic way.
Collaboration
Once your goals for the coming year are set, it’s time for your team to get to work on reaching those finish lines — but that won’t happen if you aren’t all able to work together. These templates encourage cohesive collaboration and strengthen bonds, so that your team can increase understanding, knock down silos, and enjoy getting things done as a unit.
9. Boost clarity and alignment
You might think that the basics of your team — your purpose, values, roles, rules, and more — are common knowledge. However, those can easily get lost in the demands of your daily work and responsibilities.
This Team Canvas template by Alex Ivanov is designed to be used during a 90-minute or two-hour workshop with your team. You’ll work together to understand all of your team members’ strengths, weaknesses, expectations, and more. Put simply, it helps you confirm alignment on all of the basics so that you can move through your daily to-do’s and objectives with that all-important shared understanding.
10. Stay in the loop
Setting your annual goals isn’t the end of the road. You and your team need to check in with each other frequently to monitor progress, address challenges, and even course correct when necessary.
Use this Team Daily Status Updates template by 10Pearls to increase transparency and keep your finger on the pulse of what’s happening on your team. There are sections for changes and updates, blockers and challenges, and risks and flags so that everybody has visibility into various projects’ progress. There are also sections for your weekly schedule, upcoming time off, and even your team’s overall mood, which is important context as you plan your work and commitments.
Support your team’s big dreams with seamless collaboration
As you and your team look to the year ahead, it’s exhilarating to think through the endless possibilities — to brainstorm everything that you could possibly achieve.
But you also know that setting a ton of unrealistic targets that aren’t supported with processes and strategies is a recipe for disappointment.
Miro can help you strike a balance. It provides a free-flowing space for real-time collaboration and brainstorming, but also plenty of helpful templates to add some structure and order to all of your team’s ideation. Use the ones above to set your vision, create your strategic plan, establish your targets, and improve the way you work together. And don’t forget to leverage Miro’s Annual Calendar Template to help keep your projects on track in pursuit of your 2024 goals!
You’ll head into the new year with some ambitious objectives and an actual plan for reaching them.
