Planning Studio

What this is for

Help a product team make a plan it can defend: what matters most, what can fit, what could move the date, and how to explain the trade-offs to each audience.

When this helps

• Priority meetings end with an average score but no shared understanding.
• Capacity is treated as a feeling until the roadmap slips.
• Portfolio leaders see status fragments instead of comparable product signals.
• Stakeholder updates flatten uncertainty into dates that were never real.
• Dependencies and stale estimates are discovered after a commitment has already been made.

How it works

Planning Studio sits on the existing Product Graph rather than creating a second backlog. Priority Poker stores a round and anonymised vote summaries; Capacity scenarios order selected items by their existing priority signal and show overflow against your points-per-week and horizon assumptions; Portfolio Rollups aggregate OKRs, roadmap work, risk, and recent signals across products in the same organization; Stakeholder Roadmaps create an audience-specific Now / Next / Later story from the same item IDs; Dependencies & drift stores prerequisites on the work item and flags explainable heuristics such as blocked status, past target quarters, estimate overrun, or no update for 14 days.

Before you start

• A set of opportunities, features, tickets, roadmap items, or objectives already in the workspace.
• Existing priority, effort, status, target-quarter, and update fields where available.
• Team capacity assumptions: points per week, number of weeks, and people.
• The audience, horizon, and narrative for a stakeholder update.
• Explicit prerequisites and the owner context needed to interpret drift.

What you should see

• A visible vote distribution and disagreement to discuss.
• A capacity scenario that shows what fits, what overflows, and which assumptions drive it.
• A product and portfolio rollup with OKR, roadmap, risk, and signal counts.
• A copyable stakeholder update using Now / Next / Later without false precision.
• Workspace-scoped dependency links and drift prompts that remain heuristics until a human confirms them.

Try it now

1. Open Planning Studio from the Planning group in the sidebar.
2. Start with Priority Poker when a small group needs to compare a focused set of bets. Vote privately, reveal the spread, and discuss the reasons behind disagreement.
3. Move to Capacity. Enter your normal points per week and horizon, select the work, and save a named scenario. Treat overflow as a conversation, not an automatic cut list.
4. Open Dependencies & drift before communicating dates. Add prerequisites and inspect blocked, overdue, overrun, or stale items with the owner.
5. Use Portfolio when your organization has multiple products and Stakeholder roadmap when a specific audience needs the short version.
6. Record the resulting decision in the Decision Log or link it to the roadmap, OKR, experiment, or PRD that will carry it forward.

A real example

A team has eight plausible bets. Priority Poker shows that the enterprise export is a 5 for Sales but a 2 for Engineering because the data contract is still unclear. Capacity planning shows only five of the eight items fit in six weeks. Dependencies reveal that the export depends on an unfinished permissions model. The stakeholder roadmap says “Now: onboarding reliability; Next: permissions; Later: enterprise export,” with the uncertainty visible instead of promising a date the team cannot support.

Your next move

Use Prioritization Matrix for the evidence behind a score, then continue into Execution Bridge once the plan is reviewable.