Planio Blog

The startup founder’s guide to building a strong company culture

2026-04-15T06:20:43+02:00

If you’re trying to “build a company culture” because you’ve heard it will make you more productive and profitable, you’re missing the point.

Yes, studies show that a great culture can boost productivity by 12% and revenue by 33% — but that’s not why you should care about your team’s culture.

Culture-led initiatives can’t be designed with direct ROI in mind — instead, those results only come when you create an authentic culture that embodies your values and respects the people on your team.

Creating and maintaining a meaningful company culture is hard work, especially when you’re growing rapidly. But one thing I’ve learned over the past few decades as a business owner and CEO is that ignoring culture and company values isn’t an option.

In this guide, I’ll run you through my (sometimes contrarian) beliefs about company culture, how I’ve seen it go wrong, and the steps you can take today to start building an honest and worthwhile culture with your team today.

Jump to a section:

What is company culture, really?

Despite what some thought leaders will have you think, company culture isn’t about awkward team-building activities, your benefits package, or performance management processes.

If you try to build your culture around these things, employees will quickly see through it, and view “culture” as just another distraction — or worse, a way to force them into doing things they don’t want to do.

Company culture is a set of values, behaviors, norms, and expectations that are agreed upon and followed at all levels of the organization.

To keep your culture front-of-mind, you need to live it daily. Cultural values need to be regularly communicated, shared, and reinforced, and, in the long-term, updated as things change.

Approaching culture in this way makes it more than just words on your About Us page. The culture becomes the foundation of everything you do — fueling decisions, shaping objectives, and underpinning how you’re seen by users and customers.

Here are some examples of how cultural qualities should look and feel day-to-day:

Cultural quality	What it might look like
Collaboration	Opportunities to work across teams — both in-person and asynchronously with project management tools.
Respect	Team members freely give their opinions and beliefs without fear of repercussions or embarrassment, thanks to feeling a sense of psychological safety.
Innovation	Teams have the capacity to explore new ideas with a focus on creativity, out-of-the box thinking, and trial and error.
Work-life balance	Employees have clear boundaries between work and life, with support to manage stress and reduce the risk of burnout.
Decision-making	Decisions are made objectively using data and facts. Everyone has the opportunity to input and share their views.
Communication	Communication is honest, open, and transparent, catering to employee’s needs where required.
Growth	Employees have opportunities to learn and grow in their roles and careers, with time and capacity to complete training.

As leaders, if you’re responsible for shaping a culture, it has to be something you believe, too. Employees will look to you to embody your cultural values, and if you aren’t truly living them, neither will they.

To help with this, many successful leaders link their cultural values to their mission statement, objectives, and goals, creating a “golden thread” through the entire organization. This helps with alignment, but has to be updated when those other aspects change too.

The dark side of trying too hard to build a company culture

It’s worth repeating that building and maintaining a great culture is hard work, and it’s even tougher when you don’t align it to your true values.

If you try to create a culture that looks good on paper, but you don’t actually believe in, you’ll end up doing more harm than good.

Here are some examples:

Higher employee turnover, due to a “bait and switch” culture. When the day-to-day experiences of working at your company don’t align with your sales pitch, employees are likely to become disillusioned, demotivated, and inspired to look for something different.
Lack of trust between employees and leaders. The employees you do manage to keep hold of won’t be too happy, either, as a disconnected culture erodes trust between teams and leaders. This lack of trust impacts collaboration and productivity, making you all less effective as a whole.
Poor vision and long-term goal-setting. If you can’t create that golden thread between your mission and culture, it’ll impact your vision, goals, and objectives. This breeds inefficiency, leaving you behind your competition and at risk of decreased revenue.
Constantly chasing the “next big thing”. Without a strong culture, you have no grounding, leaving you open to flip-flopping between different ideas and trends. This is confusing for your team, leaving them demotivated and burnt out.
Poor customer experience. Looking externally, your customers and users can spot a demotivated and disorganized team from a mile off. If your culture is lacking, it’s doing to start turning customers off, leading to reputational damage, too.

8 factors that define your company’s culture

Defining your company culture is an evolution. You may have an idea of what it already is, but just need some help drawing a boundary around your values. In other situations, you may be lost or feel like you’re in a transition point in your company’s growth and need more guidance.

No matter your situation, it’s important to understand that culture is more than just a single document; it’s an agreement created by a mix of words, actions, expectations, behaviors, and communications.

To keep your company culture front-of-mind, you need to live it daily.

Let’s look at all the factors that will determine if your culture is really a success:

What you say your culture is. Companies can communicate their values and culture through mission and vision statements. But rather than the be-all-end-all, these words are a starting point at best. If you don’t live up to them, they’re worthless.
How you communicate your company culture. Everyone needs to be communicated to in different ways. Simply standing up at your monthly town hall and spouting cultural values isn’t enough. Cultural messages need to be present in all your communications and cascaded down through all levels of the organization.
How decisions are made. Making tough decisions is a big part of being a leader, and sometimes, your decisions will make others unhappy. But, if you can show you made them by following your cultural values, it helps others relate to them and get on board regardless of the outcome.
How leaders treat employees. At the end of the day, we’re all people — and that extends to every level of the organization. While leaders need to make tough calls, how you interact with employees at all levels is crucial to showing you’re living the culture you’ve set.
Expectations and norms around workload. The best cultures aren’t the ones that burn people out. While all jobs require periods of intensity, how you set expectations and norms on workload is a big indicator of the culture you want to drive.
How you act when things get tough. Having a strong, well-connected culture really pays off when things aren’t going well. As leaders, it’s important to embody your values extra diligently during hard times.
How (and how often) people communicate with each other. A strong company culture promotes collaboration, teamwork, and togetherness, but that only happens when people communicate. Regularly getting people talking is important to building great connections and a sense of belonging.
How you promote inclusion. The best teams are those with a diverse mix of backgrounds, experience, opinions, and work styles. How you promote inclusivity is essential to building a great culture.

How to build a strong company culture

Company cultures rarely arise on their own — you need to take a structured step-by-step approach to make them happen.

While the steps you take will ultimately depend on your management style and the people you work with, this guide can help you answer common questions that come up along the way.

Define your personal values

As the leader, your company’s values have to align with your own. This can be quite a reflective process, where you dive deep into what matters to you, what motivates you, and how you’d like the company to be shaped in your image.

Consider these things:

Building a personal brand. The Harvard Business Review offers great insights into building a personal brand based on your values. If you’re a founder or leader, this is a great foundation to build a company culture from.
Work and leadership styles. The Planio blog has two great articles on work styles and leadership styles, both of which give great insights into how you work with others and what you expect from a healthy work environment.

Solicit feedback on your current values and culture

As you’re forming an idea of a culture built in your image, it’s important to ask others their views too. The best cultures are those that have an element of co-creation, where other leaders, managers, and employees gain ownership by feeling like they’ve shaped the process.

Consider these things:

Ask what’s already there. If you’re re-shaping an existing culture, there’s a chance that plenty of great things are already happening. Whether team rituals, ways of working, or shared team values, great cultures don’t always have to be built from scratch.
Create channels for honest feedback. As a leader, your natural position of power might stop you from getting honest feedback. To overcome this, vary the feedback channels on offer to create anonymity and honesty.

Design cultural goals with real KPIs attached to them

Culture shouldn’t have an ROI attached to it, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t measure its success (or failure). Without tangible KPIs, it’s impossible to tell if you’re making progress.

Consider these things:

North Star metrics. Setting North Star metrics is a great way to align everyone in your organisation around a common purpose. While typically a product-based metrics, the same concepts can easily apply to cultural measurements too.
Focus on common culture-led KPIs. Here are some great examples of good cultural-focused KPIs to help you get started: employee engagement, turnover rates, employee satisfaction, and internal promotion rates.

Draft, align, and agree on your new cultural values

With the foundations set, it’s time to draft your new cultural values. These values need to be simple, clear, and effective to avoid confusion and enable employees to buy-in straight away. Once drafted, align with leaders to sense check.

Consider these things:

Start with key qualities. Start by identifying 3–5 qualities that are most important to you and your company, such as teamwork, innovation, connection, trust, collaboration, or bravery.
Make a statement. Then, for each quality, write a clear and concise statement that explains how you’ll do it at your company. E.g. “We collaborate effectively, sharing knowledge and expertise to achieve common goals.”

Begin the communication cascade

Great culture is regularly communicated, shared, and reinforced. Begin this by communicating your cultural statements down through your organization, using your leadership teams and managers to support you.

Consider these things:

Create a plan. Like many things, the best communications happen when you have a plan. Our Planio article on creating a communication plan can help guide you (and even includes a free template).
Use real examples. With your culture statements set, I’d recommend encouraging your managers to use real-life examples to bring them to life. For example, to encourage collaboration, teams might start having Agile ceremonies or set up new IM chats to keep the conversation flowing.

Empower teams to break down silos and enrich culture

As a leader, it’s essential that you empower teams to work together and actively enrich the culture. There are hundreds of ways you can do this, but start by focusing on three simple things.

Trust and feedback. Building trust between leaders, managers, and employees is essential to breaking down silos, building psychological safety, and encouraging a culture to form. Create forums for employees to discuss culture with you and provide feedback — both positive and negative.
Recognition. Create mechanisms to reward and recognize those who empower your cultural values in their everyday work. Sure, this will cost you some money, but it’s worth it to reinforce the right behaviors and encourage people to take the right actions.
Tooling. Every company is a technology company in this day and age, so you need to give employees the tools to live your culture.

This is one of the reasons we built Planio, to enable teams to work together, collaborate, communicate, and build great connections as a team.

I’d encourage anyone to take a look at our range of features for tasks, communication, document management, and projects, to enable your teams to work in the right way, even those who work remote — Find out more here!

Use your cultural values as a lens for other projects

Lastly, to fully embed your culture, your values need to flow through everything that you do. As well as being “who” you are, cultural values are “what” you are, and should shape processes, decisions, propositions, and product roadmaps.

Here are some examples to bring this to life:

Feature prioritization. A company built on collaboration and communication may focus on building features that enable that for their users. After all, most products are an extension of themselves.
Hiring and other internal processes. Those who focus on honesty and transparency may build a bias-free recruitment process to ensure they live up to their promise from the first interaction.
Partners and suppliers. No company can do it all on their own, but they can be very specific about the partners and suppliers they choose. Companies with strong cultures should only partner with those who see the world in the same way.

As the leader, your company’s values have to align with your own.

Not sure if your company culture is sticking? Ask these questions

Building culture is only the beginning; sustaining it as you grow and evolve is essential.

Once your new values are off the ground, constantly check in on those cultural KPI metrics to see how you’re performing, encourage feedback, and adjust if you need to.

If you feel like it just isn’t sticking, don’t take silence as validation. Instead, be inquisitive and ask these sorts of questions to people at all levels:

How would our leaders describe the company culture?
How do employees talk to others about working at this company?
Do employees feel like they can engage with me, and other leaders?
What do former employees say in exit interviews or company reviews?
If the company were to close tomorrow, how would people feel?
What are the things employees most value about working here?

Just like Rome, no great culture is built in a day. Tools like Planio are great at helping teams collaborate, share core values, and make sure everyone’s on the same page about what matters.

If you think your tools are blocking you from building a great culture, try Planio for free — it’s simple, and you don’t even need a credit card to get signed up!

How to reduce context switching — and boost your productivity

2026-04-01T06:20:43+02:00

We’ve all had those days: You sit down at 9:00 with a clear plan for the day, but just as you’re getting into the flow, someone emails you, invites you to a meeting, or taps on your shoulder.

Context switching — regularly getting pulled from one task to another — doesn’t only eat up your time, but also your energy, attention, and motivation.

A recent study found that 43% of workers feel that context switching causes exhaustion and prevents us from making progress on “real work”. Reducing context switching can give you back a meaningful chunk of your day, provide more focus for deep work, and even boost creativity.

In this guide, we’ll explain why context switching is taking over your day, how to overcome it, and ways to rebuild your “focus muscle” over time.

Jump to a section:

What is context switching? What causes it?

Context switching is the act of jumping between unrelated tasks. While being able to juggle a varied workload is a core skill for any profession, constant context switching takes up a lot of energy that reduces productivity and increases exhaustion.

Even brief distractions can derail knowledge workers. Studies found it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task after being distracted.

The hardest thing about tackling context switching is understanding when, and how often, it happens.

Here’s a real-life example of what context switching could look like during your workday:

You start your day motivated to work on an important upcoming status report
But ten minutes in, you receive an email notification about a client issue
You “switch contexts” from deep thinking and report writing to handling the email
But while drafting a response, you receive another notification about a “high priority” ticket in your project management system
You switch to your PM tool (context switch #2) to tackle the issue before returning to the client email (context switch #3)
By the time you return to the report (context switch #4), you’ve lost your train of thought and need to take extra time to get back into the right headspace

In this example, all of these tasks are important and need your attention. But by bouncing between one and the other, all of them suffer. Unfortunately, for many people, this is just what the modern working world looks like.

Studies found it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task after being distracted.

Context switching has become so much the norm that it’s uncomfortable to sit in a quiet room and “monotask”.

But context switching isn’t just a symptom of having too many priorities. In our day-to-day lives, the most common causes of context switching also include:

Digital tools that are designed to interrupt us. Notifications, pings, and red banners trigger dopamine hits that distract our brains. Modern tools are cleverly engineered to pull us away from other work.
Regular calls, meetings, and in-person interruptions. Back-to-back schedules leave only 15-minute gaps of free time, which is never enough to enter a focused flow state.
Unclear priorities. When everything is a “top priority”, we tend to jump to the newest task rather than focus on the most important one.
Toxic work cultures. When your work culture rewards responsiveness over output, you’re more likely to get distracted and feel compelled to be constantly available. In short, you end up prioritizing quantity over quality.
Novelty seeking at a cognitive level. The human brain is a novelty-seeking tool. But the more we rely on quick hits of dopamine or distraction-led days, the more our brains seek out novelty (i.e., new tasks, updates, and news).
Information overload. We’ve never had access to more information, but our brains can only handle so much. Information overload can clutter your brain and cause you to find it hard to focus on one thing at a time.
Lack of boundaries. Working without defined focus hours tells your team that you are always available for a quick chat. While it’s great to be available, it can come at the cost of productivity.
Shadow tasks. Shadow tasks are undocumented, tiny requests that happen in direct messages and eat up cognitive energy without ever making it to a real to-do list. These silent context switchers eat away at the little spare time you already have to play with.

But what’s the bottom line here? Context switching is a systemic issue fueled by our tools, company culture, and personal habits. To “fix it”, we have to step back and recognize the underlying causes, and then redesign how we approach our workday.

The true costs of context switching

By now, you’re probably starting to recognize the triggers in your own life that cause you to switch contexts. But what’s the real impact of switching between tasks if they’re all important to your job?

Reducing context switching can give you back a meaningful chunk of your day.

While some context switching is unavoidable, excessive and prolonged context switching can seriously impact you in a number of negative ways, including:

Lower productivity: You spend so much energy “loading and unloading” tasks that your actual output plummets. Even if you do get your next task ticked off, you’re unlikely to do a top-quality job.
Increased stress and anxiety: The constant low-level panic of trying to keep too many plates spinning leads to frenetic exhaustion. Left unchecked, this can quickly turn into project management burnout.
Analysis paralysis: By mid-afternoon, your mental reserves are drained, making complex decision-making nearly impossible. This analysis paralysis means projects don’t move forward, leaving everyone stuck in the mud.
Inability to hold focus: The more you switch, the harder it becomes to concentrate on a single task for more than a few minutes. If we don’t exercise our concentration muscles it’s easy to lose that skill altogether.
Low energy and motivation: It’s hard to feel excited about work when you never get the satisfaction of finishing a major task. This snowballs into lost motivation, increasing your chance of seeking out a new role.
Confused priorities: If you’re bouncing around, it’s easy to lose sight of long-term goals. Not being able to see the wood from the trees is dangerous, as you may end up tied in knots that need to be unpicked.

But is there light at the end of the tunnel? Yes, there absolutely is! Spending time on deep work is incredibly rewarding. It provides a sense of mastery and meaningful progress. Plus, the more you practice working without distraction, the easier it becomes to focus in the future.

How to reduce context switching and regrow your “focus muscle”

To get back into the flow, you need to be tactical. Reducing context switching isn't just about trying harder to ignore distractions; it's about systematically redesigning how we manage each day to remove distractions and create space for focus. \

Here are some tactics to help you reshape your routines to minimize interruptions and maximize meaningful output.

1. Follow a consistent prioritization framework

When everything feels urgent, our natural instinct is to bounce between tasks, hoping to keep all the plates spinning at once. To combat this, we need a reliable framework to decide what actually deserves our attention at any given moment.

Actions to help:

Practice prioritization: Implement a prioritization framework to help you decide what is and isn’t important. Frameworks such as RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) can be easily adapted for any situation to help you choose the things that are most important.
Define daily goals: Start your morning by identifying your "top 3" tasks for the day. If a new request comes in that doesn't trump those three, it doesn't get your immediate focus.

2. Create a “task repository” to capture ideas and issues

Our brains are fantastic at generating ideas but terrible at holding onto them while we focus on something else. If we don’t have a trusted place to dump stray thoughts or sudden requests, they end up cluttering our minds or pulling us completely off task.

Actions to help:

Create a “Task Holding Area”: When an idea comes into your head, capture it and save it for later. To achieve this, use a notepad tool (such as Planio’s Wiki) open as your dedicated repository. When a random idea hits you, log it quickly as a new ticket, assign it no immediate due date, and close the window.
Set aside idea development time: Schedule a 15-minute block at the end of your day to review this repository and properly schedule or assign the tasks you captured using a task management tool.

3. Use time blocking to protect your focus time

If we leave our schedules open and default to reacting to others, we will never find the uninterrupted time required for meaningful work.

Time blocking flips the script by allowing you to proactively assign specific blocks of your day to specific tasks. Treating these blocks with the exact same respect as a meeting with a client or your boss is crucial for actually getting things done.

Actions to help:

Learn more about time blocking: Check out the Planio Guide to Time Blocking to give you all the tips and tricks you need to implement time blocking.
Communicate with your team: When getting started with a productivity system like time blocking, it’s important to share your plans with your team. That way, they’ll know when not to contact you, removing the chance of distractions.

4. Create rituals around your protected deep work time

Transitioning from a chaotic inbox to a state of deep concentration doesn't happen at the snap of your fingers. We need to actively signal to our brains that it's time to shift gears and block out the noise. Establishing a simple, repeatable pre-work ritual helps bridge that gap and trains your mind to drop into focus mode much faster.

Actions to help:

Set up a physical cue: Create a physical trigger for your focus time, such as putting on noise-canceling headphones, brewing a specific type of tea, or moving to a different chair.
Practice the Pomodoro technique: Use the Pomodoro Technique (working in focused 25-minute intervals) to ease yourself into deep work if you are struggling to concentrate for long stretches.
Combine the two: For the best results, combine a physical cue and Pomodoro. For example, I use Pomodoro alongside calming, classical music to get into a deep focus with regular rests to recharge and go again.

5. Use tools to plan your tasks and projects

One of the biggest hidden causes of context switching is simply trying to find the information you need to do your job. When project details are scattered across emails, spreadsheets, and chat threads, you lose momentum and open yourself up to distractions.

Pro tip: Planio’s project management tool is perfect to use as your single source of truth.

Planio’s flexible knowledge and task management system ensures that all conversations, files, and updates live directly inside the relevant task issue, saving you from jumping around to different places.

Planio has a range of apps for Agile and waterfall projects, including task management, Gantt charts, Kanban boards, documents, wikis, and even integrations with code repositories, so it really is the one place for all of your project needs.

6. Prioritize asynchronous communication

Real-time chat apps are fantastic for urgent issues, but they can become productivity killers when used for everyday project updates.

The expectation of an immediate reply forces everyone into a reactive state, constantly breaking their concentration. Shifting to asynchronous communication means you communicate thoughtfully and respond when it suits your schedule.

Action to take:

Switch up the system: Set an example for your team by moving standard project updates and non-urgent questions out of chat and into your project management tool. That way, you and your team can consume updates on their terms.
Agree on new ways of working: As a team, agree on a realistic “Response Time Agreement” (e.g., agreeing that internal emails will be answered within 24 hours, not 24 minutes) to set a culture that discourages context switching and focuses on productivity.

7. Reduce digital and physical distractions

Willpower is a finite resource, and it is usually no match for software that is designed to capture your attention. Rather than relying on discipline to ignore pings and pop-ups, actively curate your digital and physical environment to maximize focus.

Actions to take:

Go through a “Digital Detox”: Turn off all desktop and mobile push notifications for your non-essential work apps. If an issue is truly a critical emergency, someone will call you.
Clean up your physical space, too: Physical tidiness is a big enabler of productivity. In a recent study, 41% of workers believed a tidy workspace made them more productive, and 21% admitted that having a cluttered desk increased their workload.

8. Train your focus muscle during downtime

Deep concentration isn’t a personality trait; it’s a cognitive skill that requires regular practice and maintenance.

Deep concentration isn’t a personality trait; it’s a cognitive skill that requires regular practice and maintenance.

If we spend our evenings and weekends scrolling through 15-second videos, we’re actively training our brains to crave constant context switches. Rebuilding our attention spans requires us to embrace longer, slower activities outside of working hours.

Actions to help:

Get comfortable with monotasking: Practice "monotasking" in your personal life. Try to read a book, watch a film, or cook a meal without simultaneously checking your phone.
Start small: If your focus is completely shot, aim for just 15 minutes of uninterrupted reading a day and slowly build your endurance back up. Remember to take regular breaks to re-energize before jumping back in.

9. Track your working hours and progress

Lastly, as you work hard to build your focus muscles, use data to inform your journey. It’s incredibly difficult to change a habit if you don’t have a clear, objective picture of your baseline behavior.

Tracking your time provides the cold, hard data needed to identify your biggest distractions and prove to yourself that your new focus habits are working.

Actions to help:

Take advantage of Planio’s time-tracking feature: Use the Planio built-in time tracking feature to log exactly how long tasks are actually taking you, identifying where context switching is slowing you down.
Reflect, adapt, and improve: At the end of the week, review your tracked time. Seeing a solid block of hours dedicated to a high-priority task is a fantastic motivator to keep your focus habits going strong.

Why most people can’t stick with deep work (and what to do)

Setting up a schedule is easy; sticking to it when the distractions start is the hard part.

Here’s a quick guide on how to address the most common roadblocks getting in the way of your deep work:

Roadblock	Solution
You feel “guilty” about not being always available	Document your progress to remind yourself of the importance of focus time. You can use the 80/20 rule to justify your actions here.
Coworkers don’t respect your deep work time	Work with your team to agree on daily “collaboration time” and set firm response time expectations outside of those bounds.
Managers keep switching up your priorities	Keep a stack-ranked list of priorities in Planio to show leadership the immediate impact of their choices when new work is introduced.
Information silos force you to app-switch	Centralize everything. Use the Planio integrations to bring your repository, communication, and files under one roof.
You “mess up” one day and want to give up completely	Don’t be disheartened. Disconnect and come back to your daily routines and new rules tomorrow.

The bottom line: Give yourself permission to focus

We’ve been conditioned to believe that being “busy” is the same as being “productive”, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

The more we reduce context switching, the more we realize that productivity isn’t about doing more things — it’s about doing the right things with your full attention.

While rebuilding your focus takes time, new habits, and even cultural shifts, one of the best things you can do for yourself and your team is create a single source of truth for project tasks and data.

Planio helps teams break free of the real-time chat trap — putting everything you need in one place, encouraging asynchronous working, and carving out the time you all need for focused work.

Give yourself permission to close the tabs, turn off the pings, and truly focus by signing up for a free 30-day Planio trial — no credit card needed!

Product manager vs. project manager: Everything you need to know

2026-03-18T05:20:43+01:00

The terms “product manager” and “project manager” are often (mistakenly) used interchangeably by startup founders and hiring managers, driving confusion within organizations but also for individuals who operate in either role.

At a certain level of growth both personally and as an organization, it’s important to split the two roles apart to understand their unique characteristics, use cases, and value propositions.

Here’s what you need to know:

A product manager leads the long-term roadmap of a product. Their goal is to maximize the value of the product, directing the ‘what’, ‘how’, and ‘when’ of new product features that meet the needs of customers.

A project manager leads a temporary endeavor that creates change. Their goal is to deliver a defined output within set constraints (such as time, budget, and scope), handing it over to customers or business teams to use in operations.

Anyone in either of these roles will tell you this is an oversimplification. So in this guide, we’ll dive deep into the similarities, differences, and synergies of both roles to help give you the clarity you need to shape your career or business direction.

Jump to a section:

Products vs. projects: Understanding the difference

Before we can look at the roles, it’s good to understand the work a product or project manager oversees.

Let’s look at the key characteristics of a product versus a project:

A product is a good, service, or platform that satisfies customers’ needs. It follows a lifecycle (e.g., introduction, growth, maturity, retirement) but has no definitive “end” date so long as it’s providing value. Think of a technical product such as Microsoft Excel or Spotify, or even a physical product such as a pair of Nike running shoes.
A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique and specific result (e.g., a business change). Projects have defined start and end dates as well as deliverables. Think of the release of “Version 1.0” of an app or the construction of a new office block.

The confusion between product and project management comes from the overlap between the two. Both roles follow delivery lifecycles, oversee teams of resources, navigate timelines and budgets, and have specific targets and deliverables.

However, there are three main characteristics that differentiate projects from products:

	Products	Projects
Timeline	None	Defined start and end date
Team structure	“Long-lived” with team members that become experts in the product	Temporary and often composed of matrix structures
Success	Value-focused, tracking metrics such as customer adoption, revenue growth, and retention	Defined by being on time, under budget, and within the predetermined scope

Even with the similarities and differences mapped out, it can still be difficult to fully separate the product and project manager roles. Ultimately, both roles are all about delivering ‘change’, which requires a certain mix of technical and non-technical skills.

Product managers vs. project managers: Roles, responsibilities, and skills

Now that we know how products and projects differ fundamentally, let’s apply that to each specific role and highlight their key points of difference in responsibilities, skills, and success metrics:

	Product Manager	Project Manager
Role	See them as the "CEO" of the product	See them as the "COO" of the delivery
Main questions	What problem are we solving? Are we building the right thing? Are customers happy?	How do we get this done? Are we on track? Are we within time and budget?
Main responsibilities	Product strategy, roadmap visioning, customer research, feature prioritization	Project planning, scheduling, resourcing, risk management, scope control
Most important skills	Data analysis, strategic thinking, storytelling, customer empathy, communication, and technical knowledge	Organization, communication, negotiation, time management, team management, and risk analysis
Focus	Long-term value and market fit	Short-term delivery and effectiveness
Success metrics	Revenue, NPS, customer retention, customer engagement	On time, on budget, to scope

To bring this to life, let’s go a bit deeper and look at how product and project managers differ in their mindsets and daily activities.

Mindset

Product managers: By its nature, product management is a long-term role, so the best product managers need to establish a long-term product vision. Underneath that, on a day-to-day basis, they’re constantly asking, ‘Are we building the right thing?’ to help them stay aligned to that product strategy.

Project managers: On the other hand, project management is most concerned with short- and mid-term execution. With set start and end dates, project managers are more focused on their specific scope, working to get their deliverables live on time and within budget. They’re asking, ‘Are we building it in the right way, at the right speed, for the right cost?’

A day in the life

Product managers: A typical day in the life of a product manager often involves interviewing customers to understand their pain points, analyzing usage data from the last release, or negotiating with stakeholders about what features make it into the next quarter’s roadmap.

Project managers: A typical day in the life of a project manager typically involves running a daily stand-up or project meeting, updating the project plan with the latest updates, and managing risks, issues, or concerns with the project team or sponsor.

To use an analogy, while a Product Manager gazes at the horizon to see where the ship should go, the Project Manager is looking at the engine room to make sure the ship will get there without running out of fuel.

All businesses need both perspectives, but they are fundamentally different disciplines.

What does a product manager do?

If you’re still unsure of where you fit (or which role you need to hire first), here’s a deeper dive into what a product manager actually does.

Key responsibilities

A product manager’s responsibility list is full of discovery, definition, and direction setting, specifically:

Ownership: Responsible for the success of a product over its entire lifecycle.
Market research: Understanding user needs, competitors, and market trends.
Product strategy: Defining the vision and the "Why".
Prioritization: The hardest part of the job — deciding what not to build.
Roadmapping: Planning out the high-level timeline of features and releases

For product managers, Planio is a great tool for building long-term roadmaps and team structures that enable awesome products. While it’s easy to create tasks, actions, and plans, for Product Managers, the power of Planio is the ability to track your team’s effectiveness over time, allowing you to become a fluid product delivery machine.

Skills required

The best product managers have a mix of technical hard skills and soft skills, including:

Hard skills: Data analytics (SQL, Google Analytics), A/B testing methodologies, technical fluency (you don’t need to code, but you need to speak “developer”).
Soft skills: Extreme empathy (for the user), influence without authority (getting teams to follow your vision), communication, and storytelling.

Who hires them?

You can see product managers in any business, but sometimes under different titles. The most common product manager roles are found in software companies (SaaS), consumer goods, and increasingly in non-tech enterprises undergoing “digital transformation”.

Top 3 challenges for product managers

According to the 2024 State of Product Management Report, the landscape is getting tougher for product managers.

Here are some of the biggest challenges of the role:

Alignment. Getting stakeholders (e.g., sales, marketing, engineering) to agree on a single direction is cited as a top struggle. This means a lot of time negotiating and less time to focus on feature quality.
Resource constraints. Like every business, stakeholders often want to build a Ferrari but only have the budget and people for a Fiat. Product and developer resources are in high competition, so product managers often have to do more with less.
Proving value. It can take months or years to see if a product strategy paid off and stakeholders aren’t always patient. Balancing quick wins with long-term value is an ongoing battle.

Learn more: You can read more about what it takes to be a product manager in our guide to product ownership.

What does a project manager do?

For project managers, the responsibilities, skills, and challenges are different. Here’s a closer look.

Key responsibilities

The project management role is all about the delivery and control of a specific scope of work within defined constraints. This includes:

Planning: Breaking down a huge goal into actionable plans and milestones.
Resource management: Ensuring the team isn’t overworked and that the right people are working on the right tasks.
Risk management: Spotting icebergs before the ship hits them.
Communication: Acting as the central nervous system of the project, ensuring everyone knows their status.
Task and action management: Keeping everyone on track with their tasks and outstanding actions.

Planio is a great tool for project teams that need to quickly plan, collaborate, and track their project from start to finish. With features for task and issue management, collaboration, document management, and risk management, Planio is perfect for keeping everyone on the same page, even when things get tough!

Skills required

Like product managers, project managers need a mix of hard and soft skills, such as:

Hard skills: Methodologies (Agile, waterfall, scrum), budgeting, scheduling software, risk analysis.
Soft skills: Organization, leadership, communication, conflict resolution, negotiation, and staying calm under pressure.

Who hires them?

Project managers are found in pretty much all companies, including construction firms, marketing agencies, software development houses, healthcare organizations, and government bodies.

Top 3 challenges for project managers

Recent data from the Project Management Institute (PMI) highlights that the project manager role is evolving to become more focused on business acumen alongside core delivery.

Key challenges project managers face include:

Stakeholder engagement. Getting stakeholders engaged and committed in projects is increasingly difficult within a busy remote-working environment.
Timelines and resources. Like product managers, project managers are fighting for resources, with delays in resource allocation causing timeline delays and projects to slip behind.
Strategy and vision alignment. Whereas products are focused on vision, projects often find it difficult to fully align themselves with company goals. This creates further disengagement and risks them being stopped while in full flow.

Learn more: Dive deeper into the specifics of project management with our guide to being a project manager.

If you try to make one person both a project and product manager, especially at scale, you’ll build bad products.

How product and project managers work together

We’ve spent a lot of time differentiating the product and project manager roles, but we don’t want you to think they are enemies.

At most high-performing organizations, product and project managers are a dynamic duo that help ensure each other’s success.

Here are two common scenarios where they join forces:

1. The “MVP” launch

When a new product comes into being, it typically starts life as a project.

After all, projects are designed to create something new and unique. Then, once they’ve been established, it’s common for the deliverable (the product) to be handed over to a product manager to own and optimize into the future.

Example:

Imagine a fictional SaaS company, DocuFast, that wants to launch a mobile version of their popular web application.

To achieve this, they spin up a project with a budget of $100,000 and a deadline to launch the first version by Q3. They bring in a project manager to define, build, and launch, working within the constraints.

Once launched, the app is handed over to a product manager who uses initial user data to define the long-term roadmap.

2. Large roadmap delivery

While established products will have a roadmap of small and medium features, sometimes a large overhaul, upgrade, or re-platforming may be needed.

If it’s large enough, the product manager might bring on a project manager to oversee the work, often working in an Agile project management style to hit a tight deadline or work within a defined budget.

Example:

After two years of operation, DocuFast has an established, high-performing mobile app. But, out of the blue, their main server provider notifies them they are going out of business, and DocuFast must urgently re-platform to a new provider.

Given this is a high-paced, time-bound piece of work, the product manager gets a project manager in to oversee the re-platforming, ensuring it’s delivered on time and to budget.

If you’re running both project- and product-based teams and want to build greater synergies, the PMI’s ‘Dual Engines of Success’ guide is a great resource packed full of useful tips for aligning teams together to maximize success.

At a certain level of growth as an organization, it’s important to split the two roles of project and product manager apart.

The bottom line: Choose the right role for your team’s needs

While it’s easy to get lost in the crossover, product and project management are different disciplines requiring slightly different skill sets, focus, and mindsets.

If you try to make one person do both (especially as you scale), you’ll build bad products, miss key deadlines, or worse, burn them out. However, we know that not every company has the budget for two dedicated salaries, so if you had to choose, here’s what we’d base it on:

Hire a product manager if… You’re running a large product that needs to ship quickly, or you’re struggling to get focus and connection with your customer.
Hire a project manager if... You know exactly what needs to be built, but your team is chaotic, struggling to hit deadlines, or you’re tight on cash.

Whichever role you need, Planio helps teams of all sizes start organized. Whether it’s a product manager who’s building a backlog of ideas or project managers tracking time and tasks, Planio provides the structure for you to plan, track, test, and launch awesome deliverables.

Try Planio with your own team — free for 30 days (no credit card required!)

What is a gap analysis? How to drive meaningful change in your business

2026-03-04T05:20:43+01:00

Every business leader dreams of healthy revenue, happy customers, and seamless operations. But the reality is often painfully different.

Flatlining sales, messy product roadmaps, and conflicting priorities all point to one thing: a gap between where you want to be and where you actually are.

A gap analysis is a dynamic framework that helps leaders understand both the distance and underlying causes between their goals and reality. While gap analyses are most often used at the business level, they can be applied to nearly any situation where you want to identify opportunities for meaningful change.

Jump to a section:

What is a gap analysis?

A gap analysis is a business technique used to compare an organization’s current performance to its desired goals. The output of a good gap analysis is a roadmap of actions that can be taken to move you closer to your desired end state.

A gap analysis is an honest reality check of how you’re performing to identify where you’re coming up short.

To do this, a gap analysis typically has four key components:

The current state: The honest, unbiased truth of how things are running right now.
The desired future state: Where you want to be (backed by North Star metrics, business objectives, and goals).
The gaps: The specific deficiencies or shortcomings between the current state and the desired future state.
The action plan: The concrete steps you can take to close the gap and move closer to your goals.

How (and why) is a gap analysis used?

On paper, a gap analysis can seem like a lot of “busy work,” but the effort is worth the reward.

A good gap analysis can help your business by:

Forcing honesty. You can’t fix what you don’t acknowledge. A gap analysis is an objective, unbiased view of where you are today (warts and all).
Aligning the team. A gap analysis gives clear outputs, including a research-backed target to aim for. This gives everyone focus on the same business priorities.
Simplifying priorities. With clear project objectives defined, you stop wasting money (and time) on things that don’t move the needle.
Looking outward. Unlike other business analysis techniques, a gap analysis forces you to look at best practices in your sector to spark new ideas, strive for innovation, and learn lessons.
Driving performance. By closing gaps in products, sales, or customer satisfaction, you improve your business’s top and bottom lines.

As we’ve hinted at from the start, “gaps” can hide in any corner of your business. While a gap analysis can be used for any department, process, or product, the most popular use cases include:

Sales and revenue gaps

Are your sales team hitting their targets? If the target is $100k and they are hitting $70k, that’s a $30k performance gap that needs to be plugged.

Opportunity gaps

Is there a market, expansion, or innovation opportunity you're not fulfilling? Where are/aren't you playing to your strengths and taking the opportunities for growth?

Product gaps

Is there a product or service need you aren’t filling? Maybe your competitors offer a mobile app and you don’t; if so, that’s a product gap to solve.

Technology and feature gaps

At a lower level, are there features or technologies you’re not taking advantage of? Is your legacy software slowing down production while your competitors use AI-driven tools?

Every business leader dreams of healthy revenue, happy customers, and seamless operations. But the reality is often painfully different.

Resource and budget gaps

Do you have the resources (e.g., cash, headcount) to achieve your strategy? For example, you may want to launch three products but only have one developer.

Compliance gaps

Are you meeting the latest ISO standards or GDPR requirements? If not, this might be a costly gap you should look to close as soon as possible.

Skills gaps

Does your team actually have the skills and experience to achieve your goals? According to a 2023 World Economic Forum report, 44% of skills will be disrupted in the next five years — that is a massive gap waiting to happen.

Data gaps

Nowadays, every business is a data business, so do you actually have the information you need to make decisions, or are you flying blind?

While these are just examples, once you understand these core principles, you can stop guessing and start fixing practically any problem in your organization.

7 steps to perform a gap analysis

Like many things in business, a gap analysis is much easier when you have a set process to follow. Luckily, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. A gap analysis is a tried and tested technique.

Let’s walk through the process, using a fictional case study from “Peak Performance Gear” to bring it to life.

1. Define your business goals and objectives

You have to know where you’re going before you can figure out how to get there. If you haven’t already, start by clearly defining your business goals and objectives, setting a clear target to measure yourself against.

Best practices:

Set good goals. Use a strong goal-setting framework such as SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) to have clear, quantifiable goals to measure against.
Align goals, strategy, mission, and plans. Ensure the goals you set align upwards with your wider company mission but also downwards with business roadmaps. If things aren’t lined up, it’s going to be difficult to do a proper comparison.

Real-life example:

Peak Performance Gear is a new sports clothing retailer, creating eco-friendly products that help athletes maximize their performance. They have two business goals. The first, is to hit $100,000 in quarterly sales. The second, to achieve an 85% customer satisfaction score.

2. Identify the gaps you’re going to analyze

While a gap analysis can be conducted in pretty much any area, it’s best to keep each analysis tightly focused. This will help keep the quality high and ensure you and your team really focus on where you are today and any underlying issues.

Stop guessing and start fixing practically any problem in your organization.

Best practices:

Be specific. Pick a specific area of focus such as sales, customer service, or market fit, to get the most out of your gap analysis.
Engage stakeholders early. As you’re picking your area of focus, engage stakeholders to get maximum buy-in. A gap analysis can feel like you’re marking someone else’s homework, so take the time to explain what you’re doing, and why, to avoid getting any backs up.

Real-life example:

John, the Sales Director, is picking up the gap analysis for sales, as the team is currently stuck at $80,000 per quarter (vs. their $100,000 target). John identifies that while they attract plenty of new customers, very few buy a second time. This is a retention gap.

3. Collect data to inform your current state

This is where the detective work begins as you focus on the cold facts of the performance in your chosen business area. Here, you’ll audit your current processes, interactions, and data to see how things are working day-to-day.

Best practices:

Vary your data collection. Look at both quantitative data (KPIs, revenue) and qualitative data (customer interviews, team feedback). This will give you a rounded view of the current ways of working and the outputs they create.
Centralize your intel. A gap analysis is a data-intensive exercise, but you can make it a whole lot easier by using tools like Planio Wiki to document and gather all of your process maps, customer feedback logs, and performance reports in one place so the entire team can analyze them together as part of your process.

Real-life example:

John dives into Peak Performance Gear’s CRM data and finds that 60% of negative reviews mention “late shipping” with delivery taking 7 working days on average. They also interview their warehouse manager, Christina, who shares insights on current staffing and recruitment issues.

4. Use industry benchmarks to define your desired future state

While you’ll have your internal business goals and targets, you need to understand what good looks like in your industry to bring pragmatism and an external perspective to your gap analysis.

Best practices:

Perform a competitor analysis. Complete a competitive analysis to uncover what good looks like in your industry. You can also use external third-party reports or industry-standard white papers to supplement your benchmarks too.
Be realistic. When looking at benchmarks, make sure you’re realistic about what you can achieve and what good looks like for you. After all, not everyone can become the next Apple or Amazon overnight.

Real-life example:

John conducts some research on the sports retail industry and finds the average retention rate is 25-35%, led by big names such as Nike and Adidas, with average shipping times between 2-3 working days.

5. Conduct a root cause analysis to uncover opportunities

Now that you know the gap exists, it’s time to ask why by diving into the root cause. This is a critical step of the root cause analysis, as if you don’t do this, you’ll simply be putting a sticky plaster over the problem, rather than actually fixing it.

Best practices:

Repeatedly ask “why?” The "5 Whys" technique is a simple but awesome way to dive into any process improvement or root cause analysis. Just keep asking ‘why’ to get to the nub of the issue.
Build psychological safety. When you’re identifying root causes, it’s important to take a blame-free approach, focusing on broken processes, not people. This will help you get to the heart of the problem while maintaining psychological safety.

Real-life example:

John gets together with the warehouse manager to dive deeper into the shipping issue. While the team is objectively understaffed, they also discover their inventory software is outdated and their contract with couriers has an 8-day SLA for deliveries.

6. Identify solutions and develop a detailed action plan

With data on your current and desired states, you now have a gap to fill. It’s incredibly rare that a gap has just one solution, so brainstorm ideas, prioritize the best ones, and plan actions to begin moving the needle.

Best practices:

Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize. Once you’ve come up with potential solutions to close your gaps, prioritize them to decide which to tackle first. A great way to do this is to score them on "Effort vs. Impact", prioritizing quick wins whenever possible.
Build a robust project plan. Use a project management tool such as Planio to document, collaborate, and plan your solutions. Planio lets you create projects with detailed action plans, assign tasks to different team members, and track their progress on boards or Gantt charts.

Real-life example:

John comes up with three solutions to improve Peak Performance Gear’s shipping and retention issues:

Hire more warehouse staff
Renegotiate courier terms
Upgrade to a real-time inventory management system

They plan to bring in short-term contractors and immediately start negotiations for quick wins. John also writes up a two-year business case to replace their inventory management system.

There is always a difference between “what we are doing” and “what we could be doing”, but the danger isn’t the gap itself; it’s ignoring it.

7. Re-analyze your gaps and repeat the process

The business world doesn’t stand still, and neither should you. Once you’ve implemented some items in your action plan, go back and analyze your current performance. Has it improved and brought you closer to your goal? If there’s still work to do, repeat the process until you’re happy.

Best practices:

Use objective data to re-measure. After you’ve implemented a change, schedule a "Post-Implementation Review" for 3-6 months after to assess the performance. You and your team will have invested time and effort into your solution, so use data to remove any bias and objectively review the progress you’ve made.
Treat gap analysis as a cycle, not a one-off event. Gap analysis should be seen as an ongoing framework for improving your business, not a ‘one-and-done’ exercise. There’s a good chance you won’t get it right the first time, so don’t be disheartened and keep iterating until you reach your objectives.

Real-life example:

Six months later, after the new hires and revised courier SLAs, John checks the data. Shipping time has reduced to 5 business days, the retention rate has risen by 5%, and their quarterly sales are up to $93,000. The gap is closing, but now John and the team decide to push ahead with the new inventory system as the final push towards their $100,000 target.

Gap analysis examples: When, where, and how to use them

The beauty of a gap analysis is its versatility, using it to zoom in or zoom out of any business area to improve your performance.

While we’ve used our fictional sales example from Peak Performance Gear, here’s how it might look in other contexts:

Product development

Current state: Software has limited customization.
Future state: More options for users to customize the look and feel.
The gap: Your software lacks a "Dark Mode" that users are screaming for.
Action plan: Prioritize this feature in the next sprint backlog.

Company strategy

Current state: Low-cost business that positions itself as budget-friendly.
Future state: Costs are rising, so we need to adjust prices and positioning.
The gap: Customer budget-friendly expectations versus cost challenges.
Action plan: A strategic rebrand to move upmarket and increase prices.

Competitive research

Current state: Currently have 5% market share.
Future state: 10% market share and greater brand awareness.
The gap: Competitor X has a blog that drives 50k visits a month. You have zero.
Action plan: Conduct a content gap analysis and launch a content marketing strategy.

Project management and planning

Current state: 75% of projects are delivered two or more weeks late.
Future state: Reduce late delivery to 15% or less.
The gap: Project delivery isn’t poor, but estimates are consistently wrong.
Action plan: Review the work done in the Analyze phase to improve estimates.

Employee turnover

Current state: Employee turnover has spiked to 20%.
Future state: Want to be at the industry benchmark of 8%
The gap: Lack of career development and support for employees.
Action plan: Implement a new mentorship program for junior and mid-level staff.

3 more business analysis tools you can use today

Gap analysis is powerful, but it’s not the only tool in the shed. Sometimes you need a different lens to see the problem clearly.

Here are three alternative frameworks that complement a gap analysis perfectly:

1. SWOT Analysis

What is it? SWOT is a framework to evaluate an organization’s internal Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

What’s it best for? Providing a high-level overview of your current organizational position and identifying strategies to help you move forward into the future.

How can it complement a gap analysis? Use it to better understand your current state, uncovering where you’re doing well and where you can improve for the future.

2. McKinsey 7S Model

What is it? Analyzes the seven key elements and interdependencies of an organization, especially in light of organizational change — Strategy, Structure, Systems, Shared Values, Style, Staff, and Skills.

What’s it best for? Seeing your organization through multiple lenses to uncover areas for opportunity and gaps in your current operating model.

How can it complement a gap analysis? Use it to better understand your current state as well as supporting you to think about alternative solutions when making an action plan for change.

3. PESTLE Analysis

What is it? A framework used to analyze an organization’s external environment, considering factors such as your Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental environment.

What’s it best for? Seeing outside your organization to analyze your macro environment.

How can it complement a gap analysis? Use it to support your desired state benchmarking. It can support competitor analysis as well as identify market trends and factors that can create risk and opportunity.

The bottom line: A gap analysis can bring your company to the next level

Gaps exist in every company, from Fortune 500 giants to scrappy startups. There is always a difference between “what we are doing” and “what we could be doing”, but the danger isn’t the gap itself; it’s ignoring it.

A gap analysis is the perfect tool to help you identify your gaps and put a dedicated action plan in place to close them. Do it effectively, and you’ll move away from where you are now and towards where you want to be.

Remember, you’ll need a place to organize your findings, manage your action plan, and keep your team aligned. Planio helps teams run projects, gather data for gap analysis, and stay on track with powerful knowledge management, task management, and team collaboration features.

Try Planio with your own team — free for 30 days (no credit card required)

Kanban vs. Scrum: Differences, benefits, and how to choose

2026-02-18T05:20:43+01:00

In the most recent State of Agile survey, 71% of teams agreed that using Agile methodologies helps them accelerate deliveries. But there’s one thing they can’t totally agree on: whether Kanban or Scrum is the better Agile methodology.

At a high level, the difference between Kanban and Scrum comes down to this:

Kanban is a visual project management method using a board (physical or digital) to track tasks, manage work-in-progress (WIP), and improve efficiency.
Scrum is an iterative framework used to deliver value in small, usable increments through short work cycles called “sprints”.

In our experience, teams are rarely dogmatic about their approach, pulling elements from both Scrum and Kanban to guide their workflow. And that’s the best case scenario.

While it’s important to understand the differences between Agile methodologies, it’s more important to match your process to your team’s DNA. Whether you’re building a complex software product or managing a creative marketing campaign, the right choice is the one that maximizes your team’s efficiency, output, and enjoyment.

Jump to a section:

Kanban vs. Scrum: At a glance comparison

Before we look at the differences, it’s very important to call out that Kanban and Scrum are both aligned to the Agile Manifesto. They both aim to get delivery teams away from slow, delay-ridden delivery and take advantage of the flexible nature of modern technology.

Both Scrum and Kanban support these core Agile pillars:

Autonomy: They give teams the power to decide how the work gets done.
Transparency: They make work visible so there are no ‘hidden’ delays.
Iterative delivery: They prioritize getting working software (or other deliverables) into the hands of users as fast as possible.
Continuous improvement: They’re constantly looking for ways to do things better, to ultimately make teams more efficient and better delight their stakeholders.

However, the way they achieve these outcomes is a little different.

You can think of Kanban like a continuously flowing stream, where you work to make the water (i.e., the work) flow as smoothly and as quickly as possible. On the other hand, Scrum is like a relay race, broken into short, intense bursts of activity that deliver incremental outputs.

To illustrate these differences, let’s compare the core features and elements of Kanban and Scrum side-by-side:

Feature	Kanban	Scrum
Origin	Japanese manufacturing theories, namely from Toyota in the 1940s and 50s	Software development in the late 1990s
Who it’s best for	Teams with high-demands that need an efficient way to manage work	Teams building products with clear goals but that need some test-and-learn to get there
Key principles	Work visualization, limiting work in progress (WIP), and managing flow	Commitment, collaboration, autonomy, trial and error, efficiency
Cadence	Continuous flow (no set intervals)	Regular "sprints" (usually 2-4 weeks)
Value delivery	Continuous delivery or whenever each task is done	At the end of every sprint
Required roles	Role agnostic	Scrum Master, Product Owner, Developers
Change management	Changes can happen at any time	Sprints are planned — once a sprint is underway, it shouldn’t change
Primary metrics	Cycle Time and Lead Time	Velocity (how much work per sprint)
Work limits	Limited by “Work in Progress” (WIP) limits	Limited by what fits in a Sprint

While these high-level descriptions are a great starter, to make your decision between Kanban and Scrum, you need to go deeper. Let’s dive into each one to explore exactly how they work, pros and cons, and how to put them in to practice.

While it’s important to understand the differences between Agile methodologies, it’s more important to match your process to your team’s DNA.

What is Kanban? How it works, pros and cons, and practical applications

Kanban (literally “signboard” in Japanese) started on the factory floors of Toyota with a simple goal: create a system to only build what is needed, when it is needed, and in the amount needed.

In project management, Kanban has taken this initial concept and applied it to “knowledge work,” empowering teams to better track their tasks from start to finish.

How Kanban works: Key principles, deliverables, and cadence

The heart of Kanban is the Kanban board. This is a simple way to define the different stages of development (usually something along the lines of “to-do”, “doing”, and “done”), and track your tasks (as “cards”) as they move through each one.

Sounds simple, right? That’s because it is.

Kanban is designed to help you and your team to:

Visualize your workflow. You can’t manage what you can’t see. By putting every task on a card and moving it between your process stages, the whole team sees exactly where everything is (and any bottlenecks).
Limit Work in Progress (WIP). This is the USP of Kanban, setting a limit on how many items can be being worked on at once. This forces the team to finish old tasks before starting new ones, reducing the number of spinning plates and increasing focus and quality.
Manage flow. Through visualization and managing WIP, you move the focus from “Who is busy?” to “How fast is work moving?” Project teams track cycle time (i.e., how long an average task takes), working to optimize their efficiency, thus allowing them to get through more work.

There are no set roles in Kanban, so you don’t need to recruit or retrain. Instead, your team stays as it is, overlaying the Kanban methods and principles onto your existing way of working.

Why choose Kanban? 5 biggest benefits

Flexibility. If a high-priority change comes in, you can pull it into the to-do list immediately. You may need to deprioritize something else to stay within your WIP limit, but Kanban offers great flexibility.
Reducing waste. Because you’re limiting WIP, your team isn’t constantly context-switching between ten different tasks. This improves efficiency and reduces wasted time.
Easy to start. You don’t need a massive cultural shift to get started with Kanban, just a slight tweak to visualize your processes and think differently about workloads and flow.
Continuous delivery. It’s great for “business as usual” environments as well as projects. Especially if you’re working to release small updates or fixes constantly.
Visual clarity. Kanban provides an instant “health check” of the project. If the testing column is full of cards, you know exactly where the team needs to put focus and help out.

The downsides of Kanban: 4 drawbacks

Can feel aimless. Without specific deadlines, some teams find that work drifts and takes longer than it should. It sometimes requires additional leadership support to keep team motivation high by creating interim goals and success points.
Board maintenance. If the board isn’t updated in real-time, it becomes useless. It requires high discipline and engagement to keep it working efficiently.
Lack of structure. For teams that need a clear definition of done or a structured and effective meeting schedule, Kanban can feel a bit too loose.
Bottleneck sensitivity. A single slow-moving task can block the entire flow if WIP limits aren’t managed correctly.

Case study: Kanban in the real world

CreativeStream is a mid-sized marketing agency. They handle a mix of planned campaigns and reactive emergency requests from clients (like a quick social media graphic or a copy change). Before Kanban, their schedule kept getting derailed by “urgent” client requests. They switched to Kanban, implementing a WIP limit of three tasks per client. When a client sends an “urgent” request, the account manager puts it at the top of the “To Do” queue.

The design team finishes their current task, looks at the top of the list, and pulls the new urgent item in. No more broken plans, and the clients are happier with the faster turnaround.

Putting Kanban into practice with Planio

Planio’s project management tool makes Kanban even more intuitive thanks to the dedicated Agile Board functionality.

Here’s how you can get started with Kanban boards in Planio:

Set up your board: First, configure your Agile Board with your process steps. As you can see below, we’ve created columns for Open, Working On It, Waiting for Review, and Complete.

Set WIP limit: To manage your WIP and flow, next set your WIP limit for each process step. In this example below, we’ve kept Open, Feedback, and Closed as unlimited, but put a ten-task limit on “In Progress” items. This forces team members to be aware of the number of tasks being tackled at once.

When the limit is overstepped, the colum becomes red.

Check the cycle time of issues using the Agile Chart: Velocity

Educate the team: Check out our guide on Kanban boards and the psychology of cards to help your team better understand Kanban and get started with optimizing your workflow.

What is Scrum? How it works, pros and cons, and practical applications

Scrum is a framework designed to help teams work together to solve complex problems through “sprints.” These sprints are short, time-boxed periods where the team commits to finishing a set amount of work.

You can think of it this way: If Kanban is like a flowing river, Scrum is more like a sprint relay race.

While Scrum is very specifically tailored towards software development, it’s not impossible to use it for other projects and non-project use cases.

How Scrum Works: Roles, Artifacts, and Ceremonies

Scrum is more prescriptive than Kanban, following a defined framework that includes specific team roles, ceremonies, and deliverables to help software teams thrive.

The core elements of Scrum include:

Roles: Scrum teams include a Product Owner (responsible for defining what gets done), a Scrum Master (the coach who helps the team work effectively), and Developers (the doers that write and test the code).
Sprints: A fixed period (usually 2 weeks) where teams decide what to build and focus on completing it. Once the sprint starts, the goals shouldn’t change, giving a baseline to measure your output against.
Ceremonies: Daily Stand-ups (the daily check-in), Sprint Planning (the planning meeting), Sprint Review (the demo to approve what’s been done), the Sprint Retrospective (the what could we do better review), and the Backlog Refinement (what do we do next visioning) are the key Agile ceremonies that Scrum follows to make it a success.

Why choose Scrum? 5 biggest benefits

Predictability. Because you work in sprints, stakeholders know exactly when they’ll see new features. It also helps teams stay organized and develops a ‘velocity’ of output that can be measured over time.
Higher focus. Thanks to the structure and the role of the Scrum Master, the development team is shielded from outside distractions for the duration of the Sprint.
Built-in improvements. Sprint retrospectives ensures teams are constantly talking about how to get better. This fosters a continuous improvement mindset and helps improve output over time.
Clear ownership. The roles of Product Owner and Scrum Master clarify who is responsible for what, reducing “too many cooks” syndrome and leaving developers to focus on building and testing.
Motivation. Working in short, sharp bursts keeps motivation and energy high, with the fortnightly sprint goal providing a regular sense of accomplishment for the team.

The downsides of Scrum: 4 drawbacks

Meeting heavy. Between planning, grooming, stand-ups, and retros, some teams feel like they spend more time talking than doing.
Inflexibility. If a high-priority item comes in mid-sprint, it should wait until the next sprint, which can frustrate clients.
Scope creep. If the team underestimates a task, they end up with “carryover” into the next sprint, which can demoralize the team.
Role dependency. If you have a bad Scrum Master or an absentee Product Owner, the framework can fall apart quickly.

Case study: Scrum in the real world

FinTechFlow is a fictional startup building a new mobile payment app. They have a massive backlog of complex features (biometric login, bank integrations, etc.) and don’t know where to start.

They use Scrum to improve focus and clarity. Every two weeks, they commit to building one specific feature, not getting distracted by anything else.

By the end of the sprint, they have a working and tested onboarding flow to show their investors. This cadence keeps the team motivated, removes analysis paralysis, and ensures they build an effective product.

Putting Scrum into practice with Planio

Much like Kanban, Planio is the perfect place to implement Scrum thanks to its flexible, Agile-focused setup.

Here’s how you can get started with Scrum in Planio:

Backlog management: First, build a backlog of tasks and features within the Agile Board. Simply select ‘Sprint Planning’ and begin creating features (as issues) that you want to work on in the coming weeks and months.

Sprint tracking: Within your current sprint, use the Agile board we saw in Kanban to manage your specific tasks, moving them to the correct status as you work through your sprint.

Charts and reporting: Planio automatically generates burn-down charts so you can see if you’re on track to hit your sprint goals. As you get better and better at Scrum, you’ll be able to compare past performance, identify trends, and optimize efficiency.

How to choose between Kanban vs. Scrum

So, now you know a bit more about Kanban and Scrum, how do you know which one is right for you? It’s rarely a black-and-white choice. Often, the nature of your project, your team’s maturity, and even organizational culture will dictate the path.

As the team at the Scrum Alliance often says, the choice comes down to how much “change” you’re managing and how much “structure” you need.

Choose Kanban if:

Your work is highly reactive (e.g., support tickets, creative requests)
You want to start improving your process without changing everyone’s job titles
You need to be able to change priorities at a moment’s notice
The “continuous flow” of delivery is more important than a “big reveal”
You’re working on topics that aren’t software development

Choose Scrum if:

You are building a complex product that requires focused work
Your team benefits from a clear, predictable structure and regular deadlines
You need to provide regular, timed updates to stakeholders
You struggle with focus and need to protect your team from outside interference

Food for thought: Many modern teams use “Scrumban”, a combination of the structure and roles of Scrum (sprints and retrospectives) but applying Kanban’s WIP limits and visual boards to manage the daily flow. This can be a best of both worlds approach, especially for established teams that like a good balance of structure and autonomy.

Get teams away from slow, delay-ridden delivery and take advantage of the flexible nature of modern technology, with Agile.

Kanban or Scrum? With Planio, the choice is yours

While many organizations use Agile to deliver their projects, there’s still a lot of debate about Kanban and Scrum. Both have their pros and cons, so it’s best to choose a framework based on your team, your objectives, and your organization’s ways of working.

Whichever way you go, Planio is ready to help you and your team build great products. Whether it’s optimizing WIP and flow with Kanban or planning and delivering fast-paced sprints in Scrum, the Agile Board has the structure and flexibility to meet your needs.

But the real advantage is that over time your team’s needs will change. You might start with Scrum while you’re building a new product and then transition to Kanban once you move into maintenance and support.

With Planio, you don’t have to switch tools or retrain your team when that happens because we can do both Kanban and Scrum.

Try Planio with your own team today — free for 30 days (no credit card required).

A CEO’s guide on how to approach professional growth

2026-02-04T05:20:43+01:00

The average person spends one-third of their lifetime — or around 90,000 hours — working. So, it’s no wonder that we’re all so caught up in being happy and fulfilled with our careers.

Yet, while surveys show that a slight majority of people are satisfied with their day-to-day work, many of us feel a never-ending nagging need for more.

Whether it’s chasing the next promotion, a pay rise, or just more responsibility, professional growth is often considered the only way to achieve fulfillment at work. But growth for growth’s sake is often a recipe for burnout and failure.

Throughout my career I’ve progressed from being a web designer and developer to agency owner and now CEO of a successful software company. But the path was rarely clear.

From my experiences — and the mistakes I’ve made along the way — I’ve realized the importance of spending regular time revisiting why you want to progress in your career, rather than just blindly chasing the next challenge.

Jump to a section:

In this guide, I want to share my own beliefs about career progression and best tips on how to thoughtfully design a career path for yourself that is fulfilling, rewarding, and balanced.

What should professional growth look like?

The truth is that there is no single answer to how professional growth should happen. However, that doesn’t stop business bloggers and websites from explaining exactly what you should do to progress in your career.

For example, here’s what comes up when I asked Google to define professional growth:

Professional growth is the ongoing process of developing and improving your skills, knowledge, and abilities to advance your career and enhance your professional capabilities.

Overall, this isn’t a bad definition, but it has one major flaw: it ignores the human element that influences so many of our decisions, both at work and in life.

Click on any of the top search results about career progression and you’ll get a list of similar advice, such as:

Create a career plan for the job you want in 3, 5, or 10 years
Complete training courses to strengthen the skills those jobs need
Reformat your resume to appeal to the next job you want
Start applying for those jobs and cross your fingers

In reality, most people’s motivations just aren’t that simple. These guides are built on outdated views of why people want to grow, completely disregarding personal satisfaction, our guiding principles and values, and ethical ambitions.

By looking for growth opportunities without considering the fundamental reasons why you’re stuck right now, you’ll become trapped in an endless cycle of wanting more with no end in sight.

That’s why, my personal definition of professional growth is slightly different:

Professional growth is the process of understanding your values, ambitions, and long-term goals and using them to guide purposeful actions that benefit both you and the people you work with.

That’s how I’ve tried to craft my career and the company culture at Planio. Rather than focus on raising huge rounds of funding and chasing the latest marketing trends, we’ve built a team of engineers with a passion for finding unique solutions to complex problems.

We share a set of core values around sustainability, creativity, and balance — and every decision we make is informed by them.

While those might not be the values that drive you forward, considering what makes you feel satisfied is a good place to start when approaching career growth.

By looking for growth opportunities without considering the fundamental reasons why you’re stuck, you’ll become trapped in an endless cycle of wanting more with no end in sight.

My best advice on how to approach professional growth

To get unstuck and make a solid plan for meaningful professional growth, you need to take time to reflect, plan, and take purposeful action.

Here are a few exercises I like to try whenever I’m at a loss of which path to choose next:

Start with your values, not your goals

Before looking ahead, it’s important to look inwards at who you are and what brings you happiness.

Aligning your future goals to your personal values increases your chance of fulfillment and can even reduce the anxiety and stress of doing something that isn’t really you.

If you blindly chase your goals, you might inadvertently put yourself at risk of burnout.

Start by answering some of these self reflection questions to better understand your values and motivations:

What is important to you? Consider what you care about deeply and what motivates your actions.
What would a perfect day look like? What activities and interactions would bring you the most fulfillment — e.g., working with others vs. focused work.
What do you spend your free time on? What activities and interests energize you outside of work?
What would you do if there were no limitations? Think outside the box.
What qualities do you admire in others? What traits do you find inspiring and why?
What do you want your life to stand for? What legacy do you want to leave?

Take stock of where you are now

While you think through your core values, it’s a good idea to try to apply them to why you feel the need to change your current position.

Do you feel like you’re not being challenged enough in your current position? Are you looking for more responsibility? A new title? Higher pay? Respect from others in your industry?

Sometimes, when we reflect on where we are and where we want to be, it becomes clear that the changes don’t need to be so drastic. A few adjustments could be all it takes to become more fulfilled and happy with your current position.

Don’t always feel like you have to make large changes just to “keep up” with expectations or what other people are chasing.

Think long-term when planning your goals

Once you’ve established that you want a change and understand what motivates you, it’s time to look forward to your goals. It’s important to balance your short and long-term goal setting to ensure you have a North Star to aim for, but still maintain flexibility to react to whatever life brings.

Remember, goals are just guesses. What you want now may change in a year, a month, or even a day. So, give yourself a target to aim for, but don’t be afraid to pivot if it feels right.

Here are some resources to help you think about your goals:

Take advantage of proven goal-setting exercises. There’s an art to goal setting that takes time to master. While it’s focused on techies, our goal setting guide has some transferable insights to help you set goals like a high performer.
Don’t get trapped by your limiting beliefs. We all have limiting beliefs — ingrained ways of thinking that can hold us back from dreaming big and ignoring our true long-term vision. Especially when you think about your long-term goals, don’t be afraid to be ambitious and take risks.

If you feel overwhelmed, try the WOOP method

Planning your professional growth can become overwhelming. As you grapple with the feelings of wanting more, it can feel like there’s too many paths to choose from, leaving you lost, confused, and unable to make a purposeful plan.

Here are two methods to help you move forward:

Acknowledge analysis paralysis. When faced with too many options, analysis paralysis stops us from picking a path and moving forward. If you’re facing a crossroad, techniques such as creating psychological safety, setting decision deadlines, and overcoming perfectionism are great ways to break through the noise and make progress.
Try the WOOP (Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan) method. WOOP is a positive psychology strategy that helps you achieve your goals by visualizing positive outcomes and anticipating potential obstacles. Here are just some of the ways people use WOOP to overcome challenges:

WOOP Stage	Use Case: Studying	Use Case: Fitness	Use Case: Professional Growth
Wish	“I want to improve my grades”	“I want to run a 25:00 5km”	“I want to be promoted to Senior Manager”
Outcome	“I will be proud holding my exam results surrounded by my family and friends”	“I will finish in the top 10% of my next race and receive a medal”	“I will interview for a job and be successful against other applicants”
Obstacle	“I struggle with motivation to study”	“I struggle with shin splints”	“I don’t have the relevant experience dealing with senior stakeholders”
Plan	“I will set a clear study schedule and study with a friend”	“I will mix running with other exercise, such as swimming, to improve my fitness while minimizing injury”	“I will volunteer for additional projects with a different team who frequently work with senior team members”

Find like-minded people and mentors (and create real connections)

Motivational speaker Jim Rohn once said that you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with. While I don’t believe this is strictly true, I do agree that to become the person you want to be, it pays to be around like-minded people.

In the professional world, your network is a powerful thing, providing you with access to support, guidance, knowledge, and wisdom that helps you grow and develop into the person you want to be.

Here’s some advice for building a great network:

Play the long game. A valuable network isn’t built in a day. Instead, focus on creating real, long-lasting relationships that will benefit you in the long term. A meaningless relationship with an immediate payoff might feel good in the moment, but won’t give you the benefit of a genuine connection.
Take advantage of mentoring. Most successful people have, or have had, mentors throughout their career. Mentoring is a great way to gain knowledge, share ideas, and have honest conversations about your personal and professional growth with someone who is outside your direct career trajectory.

Master your core skills, but regularly look for new challenges

The professional growth narrative becomes toxic when it encourages people to become an expert at everything. This simply isn’t possible.

Whether you’re a developer, project manager, or an accountant, it’s important to continually focus and strengthen a core set of skills. This is your foundation that helps you excel in your chosen industry.

But, you should never stop learning. Try to foster a sense of curiosity to help you grow and develop next skills that open the door to new and exciting opportunities.

Here are some areas to think about:

Divergence vs. convergence. The most successful people balance structure and discipline with creative thinking and problem-solving. This requires a healthy mix of convergent and divergent thinking. We all favor one of these sides, so make sure you’re regularly challenging yourself to develop the other side too.
Leadership vs. management. For many people, professional growth is focused on moving upwards in their career. While some shoot for mastery of a particular role (e.g. software development), most focus on developing their leadership and management skills. They’re both slightly different things, so if you’re looking to develop, put an equal focus on each one to succeed.

Be reliable and hit your targets

While development is important, to truly grow you need someone to take a chance on you.

The best way to do that is to focus on being reliable and trustworthy — someone that can be trusted to get the job done when others can’t. Without building that reputation, it’s going to be difficult to progress onto the next stage of your career.

Here are a few areas I like to focus on to show that I’m a reliable person to work with:

Soft skills. The best professionals have a core set of soft skills to help them hit their targets and optimize their self-management. Focus on developing your organization, time management, communication, and relationship building to put you in the best position to grow and succeed.
Just get stuff done. The world is full of people who are great at pointing out problems. What leaders really want is someone who can face a challenge, take ownership, and get the job done. Here’s a great video from Barack Obama on the power of being a “get stuff done” type of person.

Bring (most of) your whole self to work

To strike the balance between professional growth and protecting your mental well-being, you need to bring your whole self to your work. That means not being afraid to share who you are, what matters to you and your hobbies and interests. This creates an open work environment, while also building trust and authenticity.

Here’s a couple of more tips:

Protect your energy. Find ways to combine your professional work (and growth) and your day-to-day life. But at the same time, be careful to not fall out of balance to protect personal energy. Fail to make time for “you” at work, and you’ll quickly become demotivated and risk burning out.
Celebrate, celebrate, celebrate. In the professional world, we don’t take enough opportunities to celebrate. As you embark on your journey, spend less time looking ahead and more time celebrating how far you’ve come. Not only will it motivate you, but celebrating is the perfect way to strengthen trust and build lasting relationships.

As you head out on your professional growth journey, focus on doing it in a controlled and sustainable way.

Don’t rush — progress with purpose and awareness

To finish, remember that professional growth is a journey that takes time. Many people want success instantly, but often it takes time to nurture, manifest, and develop at its speed — rush it, and you risk damage rather than success.

As you head out on your professional growth journey, focus on doing it in a controlled and sustainable way:

Step back as much as you step forward. Continually re-align your actions to your values, ensuring wherever you’re heading lines up with the “real you” and what makes you happy.
Practice reflection and resilience. Making mistakes is an evitable part of growth. If something doesn’t feel right, chances are it wasn’t the right step. Don’t get down about it, learn from your mistakes, brush yourself off, and use the experience to make a better decision next time.
Don’t be afraid to take risks. Career paths rarely go in a straight line. Instead, they meander as new doors open, opportunities arise, and plans you thought were certain fall apart. Don’t be afraid to take a risk here and there, as long as it aligns with your values, purpose, and fulfillment.

The bottom line: Make sure you’re growing in the right direction.

Growth for the sake of growth is never good. While for some, the nagging feeling of wanting more just won’t go away, pushing hard for that next promotion or pay rise isn’t always the right way to grow.

Instead, take a more considered, value-driven approach to career progression by taking time to understand yourself, what makes you happy, and how your career can align with your goals and dreams.

Grow in this way, and you’re far more likely to reach fulfillment without risking your mental health along the road.

At Planio, taking this considered approach to growth is our secret to success. Rather than focusing on fancy features and lavish marketing, we created a simple tool that cultivated success, by making it easy for our worldwide team to ship working software, day in, day out.

It’s worked pretty well for us so far, so I hope these same tips will help you on your own professional growth journey!

10 virtual team-building exercises remote teams will actually enjoy

2026-01-07T05:20:43+01:00

If you’re a manager, you know that personal connection is the glue that holds teams together — but that it’s also not always easy to create, especially on remote teams.

Research shows that workplace belonging leads to a 56% increase in job performance and a 50% reduction in turnover risk.

Unfortunately, most of us have had to deal with sitting through awkward icebreakers, “fun Fridays,” and other cringe-worthy exercises that were designed to build team connection, but just don’t work in a virtual environment.

Luckily, all is not lost for virtual team building. You can still create team connections, even when working remotely. It just requires a dedicated approach that’s tailored to the team, your objectives, and the remote environment.

Jump to a section:

Why virtual team-building exercises still matter

Virtual team-building exercises are structured activities and games conducted online to help remote team members connect on a personal level.

While they’re a crucial tool for building a strong, cohesive team culture across different locations and time zones, they’re also about having fun and giving people a short respite from the pressures of their daily workload.

When we invest in building strong connections, something powerful happens: we create psychological safety.

This is the shared belief that the team is safe, can take risks, and feel accepted and respected for who they are.

Teams with this foundation receive a range of benefits, including increases to:

Collaboration and communication. When we know our colleagues as people, we’re more likely to communicate openly and collaborate effectively.
Empathy and trust. Sharing experiences helps us understand each other’s perspectives and builds a foundation of trust that’s essential for teamwork.
Engagement and morale. Feeling connected to a team boosts job satisfaction and motivation, leading to higher morale and engagement.
Innovation. A psychologically safe environment encourages team members to share new ideas without fear of judgment.
Problem-solving skills. Many team-building exercises are based on collaborative problem-solving, which hones skills that are directly transferable to even the most complex workplace problems.

Fostering a positive company culture also helps to reduce turnover, as employees who feel a strong sense of belonging are more likely to stay with a company long-term.

Investing in team-building sends a clear message that the company values its people and their relationships. Feeling connected to culture is also a key part of turbocharging through the stages of team development, as connections build and conflicts reduce much faster.

How to design an effective team-building exercise

A great team-building exercise doesn’t just happen; it requires a deep knowledge of your team, thoughtful planning, and clear goals and objectives.

Let’s walk through the key steps you should take to design meaningful virtual team-building activities.

To really bring it to life, we’ll tell the story through “Sarah”, a fictional manager who’s organizing some activities for her virtual “Dev Dinos” team:

1. Understand your team’s personalities

Sarah knows her team is mostly introverts who are highly analytical and enjoy a good puzzle. A loud, high-energy “virtual party” might not be the best fit.

A great team-building exercise doesn’t just happen; it requires a deep knowledge of your team, thoughtful planning, and clear goals and objectives.

2. Get team-wide buy-in

Instead of just dropping an event into the calendar, Sarah discusses the idea for virtual team building with the team. She uses a poll to get feedback on a few ideas — a virtual escape room, a collaborative coding challenge, or a team quiz — getting the team engaged right from the start.

3. Introduce the topic of Psychological safety

Before the activity, Sarah emphasizes that the goal is to simply connect and have some fun. There’s no pressure to be the "best". Instead, it’s a judgment-free zone for participating at your own level.

4. Match activities to personal circumstances

The Dev Dinos are spread across different time zones. Sarah schedules the activity for a time that works for everyone, ensuring it’s during paid work hours. She also checks if anyone has accessibility needs or other commitments.

5. Encourage creativity

Technical teams like the Dev Dinos spend their days working with logic and code. Sarah chooses the virtual escape room because it allows them to flex their problem-solving skills in a fun, creative, and collaborative way — a different part of their brain than they usually use.

6. Plan the activity properly

A good event needs good organization. Sarah creates a project in Planio to manage the activity. She creates a task list, assigns a team member to send the calendar invite with the link, and creates a wiki page with all the details so everyone knows what to expect.

7. Bring the energy and enthusiasm

As the facilitator, Sarah’s energy will set the tone. She starts the call with a warm welcome and genuine enthusiasm, and impersonates the escape room’s characters. This helps everyone relax, have a laugh, and get into the spirit of the activity.

8. Reflect and incorporate feedback

After the escape room, Sarah sends out a quick, anonymous survey to see what the team enjoyed and what could be improved. She’ll use this feedback to make the next team-building session even better.

The biggest pitfalls of team-building exercises you need to avoid

We’ve all been in a team-building session that missed the mark. Managing remote teams is hard, but you can dramatically increase your chances of team cohesion by steering clear of these common team-building pitfalls.

Let’s look at the most common and how to avoid them:

Problem	Solution
Irrelevant activities that feel childish or patronizing: The goal is to build professional trust and rapport, not to make your team feel like they’re in kindergarten.	Choose activities that respect their intelligence and maturity, or are clearly briefed as lighthearted fun.
One-size-fits-all exercises: Your team is made up of diverse individuals with different personalities, interests, and comfort levels. An activity that one person loves, another might dread.	Offering variety from activity-to-activity is key. Put your activities to a vote to get buy-in from the start.
Not considering team workloads and schedules: Adding a "mandatory fun" session to an already overstretched team is a recipe for resentment.	Plan activities well in advance and be mindful of project deadlines and stress levels.
“Forced fun” with no meaningful benefit: If an activity feels completely disconnected from the team’s actual working relationships, it can feel like a waste of time.	The best exercises have subtle ties back to improving skills such as collaboration or communication, or aim to build trust and connection.
Lack of energy and enthusiasm: If the person leading the session seems bored or disengaged, that feeling will quickly spread to the rest of the team.	The facilitator needs to be the event’s biggest champion. As a manager, that may mean delegating the facilitation to someone else, or paying for a professional.
No follow-up: A one-off event is unlikely to have a lasting impact. The real magic happens when you develop connections into strong team rituals.	Make sure to embed the outcomes of your event into future work or collaboration.
Not listening to the team’s feedback: Miss the mark once and you’ll get forgiveness; miss it repeatedly and your team will become disengaged. If you don’t ask for feedback, you’ll never know, and you risk repeating the same mistakes.	Ask for honest event feedback, keeping it anonymous if needs be. Don’t take any criticism personally, and instead, use it to build better for next time.

10 virtual team-building exercises to try today

Now that we know all about what virtual team-building exercises are and what makes them great, it’s time to bring it to life with some ideas.

Here are 10 exercises that can help build resilience, psychological safety, and genuine connection within your remote team.

1. Birth map

How it works: Each team member shares their screen and points to where they were born on a digital map. They then spend a few minutes sharing a story or a couple of interesting facts about their hometown and how they grew up.

Why it’s effective: This is a simple, low-pressure way to learn about each other’s backgrounds. It fosters empathy and understanding by giving context to who people are outside of work and identifies things team members have in common.

Who it’s best for: New teams, or teams with new hires, as a gentle and personal icebreaker.

2. Virtual office tours

How it works: Team members give a short, 2-3 minute tour of their home office or workspace via webcam. This isn't about having a perfect home; it's about sharing a small slice of their daily life.

Why it’s effective: It helps humanize colleagues by literally showing where they work every day. It often leads to conversations about pets, hobbies, and family, all while creating natural connection points.

Who it’s best for: Small, established teams who are comfortable sharing a bit of their personal space.

3. Arts and crafts

How it works: Send each team member a small arts and crafts kit in the mail (e.g., painting, clay modeling, or jewelry making). Then, get together on a video call to work on the craft together, chat, and share your creations.

Why it’s effective: It’s a relaxing, hands-on activity that doesn’t require intense focus on a screen. It allows for casual conversation to flow naturally while people are busy with their hands, while also calming the team against the stress of everyday life.

Who it’s best for: Teams (especially those with a creative flair) that need a break from technical, screen-based work and want to engage in a low-stakes creative activity.

How it works: Similar to arts and crafts, mail a kit with plain cookies, icing, and sprinkles to each team member. Everyone gets on a call to decorate their cookies. You can add a theme for extra fun.

Why it’s effective: It’s a lighthearted and tasty way to spend time together. There’s no pressure to be an artist, and the end result is a delicious treat.

Who it’s best for: Great for celebrating holidays (especially for international teams), project milestones, or just as a fun Friday activity for any team.

5. Virtual escape or puzzle rooms

How it works: Teams work together in a virtual room to solve a series of puzzles and challenges to "escape" within a time limit. Many companies offer hosted online escape room experiences, with a variety of sleuth, scary, or adventure themes.

Why it’s effective: This is a fantastic exercise in communication, collaboration, and problem-solving under pressure — all skills that are directly applicable to work projects.

Who it’s best for: Teams that enjoy puzzles and challenges. It’s particularly good for cross-functional teams who need to practice working together, with a fun, adventurous twist.

6. Virtual scavenger hunts

How it works: The facilitator calls out a series of items (e.g., "something you're proud of," "your favorite mug", "something green", etc.), and team members have to run and find the item in their home and show it on camera.

Why it’s effective: It’s a high-energy, fast-paced game that gets people moving and laughing. It also reveals fun, personal details about each team member through the objects they choose to share.

Who it’s best for: Any team looking for a quick and easy energy boost at the start of a meeting.

7. Wellness or meditation sessions

How it works: Hire a professional to lead the team through a guided meditation, a desk yoga session, or a mindfulness workshop.

Why it’s effective: This shows the company cares about employee wellbeing and helps combat the stress and burnout that can come with remote work. It provides a shared moment of calm and relaxation.

Who it’s best for: Teams that are experiencing high levels of stress or those with a strong interest in health and wellness.

8. Team quiz challenge

How it works: A lockdown favorite! Create a trivia quiz using an online tool. You can use general knowledge questions or create custom rounds about your company, industry, or even inside jokes from the team.

Why it’s effective: This is a classic for a reason. Quizzes encourage friendly competition and teamwork if you play in groups. Customizing the questions makes it more personal and engaging, and you can even focus on development topics to enhance learning.

Who it’s best for: Larger teams, as you can easily break them out into smaller groups to compete.

9. Short movie ‘nights’

How it works: The team votes on a short film or a TV show episode to watch together using a watch-party app that synchronizes playback.

Why it’s effective: It mimics the shared cultural experience of watching something together, providing common ground for future conversations ("Did you see that scene where...?"). It’s a low-effort way to bond.

Who it’s best for: Teams that want a relaxed, low-interaction social event to wind down at the end of a week (just make sure to do it during the working day!)

10. Virtual murder mystery

How it works: Each team member is assigned a character in a murder mystery plot. They interact, share clues, and work together to figure out who the culprit is. Hosted options are available to make this seamless.

Why it’s effective: This is an immersive experience that encourages creative thinking, communication, and deduction.

Who it’s best for: Outgoing teams that enjoy a bit of drama and role-playing. Excellent for building cross-team relationships.

Top tips to make virtual team-building exercises effective

Having a list of great ideas is one thing; executing them well is another. Here are a few best practices for making your team-building exercises meaningful and impactful.

Keep sessions short. "Zoom fatigue" is real. It’s better to have a focused and engaging 30-45 minute session than a rambling two-hour one.
Swap out facilitators. You don’t have to lead every single activity. Encourage other team members to take turns hosting, which gives them a chance to develop leadership and communication skills along the way.
Mandatory vs. optional. While there are pros and cons to each side, consider whether you should make virtual events mandatory or optional. True connection can’t be forced, but getting the team together has its benefits.
Balance fun with professional development. The best activities are enjoyable, but also subtly reinforce skills like communication, collaboration, or creative thinking.
Turn exciting exercises into ongoing rituals. If the team loves a monthly quiz or a weekly scavenger hunt, turn it into a recurring event. Team rituals create a predictable and comforting rhythm of connection.

Planio includes a free, built-in video conferencing app, Planio Meet, so you can start quick and secure video calls with your team directly from your project — no need for invites. Just install it and anyone who opens Meet within the project is automatically connected. Planio Meet works on desktop and mobile devices and is fully compatible with Jitsi.

The bottom line: Don’t settle for outdated and cheesy team-building

Remote teams can often feel isolated, but the answer isn’t to force people into awkward virtual happy hours.

Research shows that workplace belonging leads to an increase in job performance and a reduction in turnover risk.

The key to effective virtual team-building isn’t frequency or flashy activities. A mix of thoughtful rituals and creative exercises can build trust and camaraderie without draining productivity or morale.

If you’re a manager looking to schedule your next virtual team event, Planio provides a central hub to help you coordinate activities using tasks, track RSVPs via chat, gather feedback using forums, and build a repository of team-building ideas for the future in our Wiki.

Try Planio with your own team, free for 30 days (no credit card required!)

How to do project capacity planning (the right way)

2025-12-10T05:20:43+01:00

In an ideal world, every project would have the exact amount of resources needed to be successful. But every project manager and team leader knows this is rarely the case.

Resources — whether people, budget, or technology — can be fleeting, with multiple teams often vying for the same resources at the same time. The best leaders recognize just how much a lack of resources can become a risk to their project’s success and put systems in place to ensure they get access to the tools they need to succeed.

Capacity planning is a systematic process used to forecast demand and plan the resources you need ahead of time.

While it can take time to set up a proper capacity planning program, that initial investment can pay you multiples back in planning time, successful launches, and ongoing cost optimizations.

Jump to a section:

In this post, we’ll dig into what capacity planning is, the different approaches you can take, and how to continuously manage it throughout any project.

What is capacity planning?

Capacity planning is a systematic way to forecast demand and plan the resources you need ahead of time.

In practice, it’s a series of processes used to understand stakeholder needs, convert those needs into resource requirements, and then take action to match those resources to your team’s capacity.

We’ll go into more details about how to perform capacity planning below, but for now you can think of it like this:

Capacity planning ensures you have the RIGHT resources, of the RIGHT quantity, at the RIGHT time.

But, when we talk about “resources,” what do we mean?

Despite what you may believe, resources aren’t just people — they can also include:

Materials: Most things aren’t made from thin air. Especially in construction and manufacturing projects, material resources include wood, paper, metal, and even natural minerals and water.
Tools and equipment: Hardware, software, and machinery required to build/make project outputs. This could be anything from plant machinery through to software licenses and computers.
Facilities: The physical spaces project teams need to do their work, like meeting rooms, workshops, warehouses, or specialized science labs.
Budget: The financial resources allocated to the project to cover all expenses, from salaries to material costs.
Timeline: Schedules and due dates can also become resources, especially when dealing with cross-functional projects that require careful planning and execution.

Capacity planning requires taking a high-level view of your project to deeply understand your needs — and what resources will be required to get you over the finish line.

The 6 biggest benefits of capacity planning

Beyond just helping you better plan for your project’s needs, capacity planning can change your team’s mindset and unlock productivity.

Here are a few of the biggest benefits of capacity planning:

Prepares you for uncertainty. Capacity planning gives you a forward-looking view of demand and helps you anticipate future bottlenecks before they become critical issues.
Increases predictability, reliability, and confidence. When you know what’s coming and what you can realistically achieve, you can set more accurate deadlines and deliver on your promise to stakeholders.
Minimizes project costs. Resources are costly. To stay on budget, you need to optimize how you use them. Proper planning helps avoid unnecessary costs such as hiring last-minute freelancers, paying for rush orders, or dealing with the fallout from project delays.
Improves team morale. A well-paced workload prevents burnout and shows your team that their well-being is a priority. Happy teams are productive teams.
Supports strategic goals. Having the capacity to do all of your important work is essential for meeting strategic goals. When you get capacity planning right, your most valuable resources (your people) are allocated to the projects that deliver the most value to the business.6. Facilitates better decision-making. Lastly, a clear view of capacity and demand enables you to make informed choices about which projects to take on, delay, or decline. Making data-driven decisions is better for everyone, taking the emotion out of tough decisions and strengthening project-client relationships.

Capacity planning vs. resource management

The terms “capacity planning” and “resource management” are often used interchangeably. While they’re heavily linked, they are two distinct disciplines, so it’s important to understand exactly what each of them are.

Put simply: Capacity planning is about the big picture and the long term, while resource management (or resource allocation) is a more tactical action, focused on the here and now.

	Capacity planning	Resource management
What is it?	A systematic way to forecast demand and plan the resources you need ahead of time.	The practice of planning, scheduling, and allocating resources to a project or program.
Level	Strategic	Tactical
Timeframe	Quarters and years	Weeks and months
What is it for?	Answering “What are our long-term resource requirements?”	Answering “Who is working on what right now, and are they being effectively used?”
When to do it?	As part of regular strategic planning	As part of project and program governance
Problems it solves	Prevents overcommitment, informs hiring decisions, and ensures long-term scalability.	Resolves scheduling conflicts, optimizes daily workload, and levels resources across projects.

In practice, these two disciplines work together in harmony, with capacity planning typically informing resource management practices.

Let’s use an example of a creative agency to bring it to life:

Their capacity planning process looks across the next six months of potential client work, identifying the need for an additional senior designer to meet the expected demand. This is a long-term, strategic decision.
Then, resource management comes into play in the weekly projects review. Managers see that Designer A has some downtime on Wednesday, so they assign them a smaller task from another project to keep the workload balanced and the project moving.

Pro tip: You may also hear people using more specific terms like “workforce capacity planning” or “budget capacity planning.” These disciplines often fall out of, or are a part of, capacity planning, with workforce focusing on people and budget focusing on overall costs as part of the project management triple constraint.

4 common approaches to capacity planning

Once you’ve identified your capacity requirements, there are typically four common ways you can approach resourcing to meet them.

1. Lead strategy (proactive)

A Lead strategy involves adding capacity before demand increases. It’s an aggressive, forward-thinking approach based on anticipating future growth and having the budget available to act early.

Best for: Businesses in high-growth industries or those preparing for a major product launch. It’s ideal when the cost of not meeting demand is higher than the cost of having idle resources.

Example: A software company plans to launch a major new feature in six months, and they anticipate a huge spike in customer support tickets. Using a lead capacity planning strategy, they hire and train three new support agents three months before the launch.

2. Lag strategy (reactive)

The Lag strategy is the opposite of the Lead strategy. You only add capacity after demand is proven to be there and your existing resources are stretched to their limit. It’s a more conservative and cost-conscious approach, but it risks employee burnout and impacting customer satisfaction.

Best for: Companies in stable or slow-growth markets, or those with tight budget constraints. It minimizes the financial risk of investing in resources that might not be needed.

Example: An e-commerce business sees a steady increase in orders over a three-month period. Their fulfillment team is now working overtime consistently to keep up. Seeing this sustained demand, the operations manager gets approval to hire two new warehouse staff. They waited until the need was undeniable before investing.

3. Match strategy (balanced)

The Match strategy is a more moderate approach, where you gradually add capacity in small increments as demand grows. It aims to align resources and demand as closely as possible.

Best for: Organizations that experience predictable, steady growth. It offers a balance between the risk of the Lead strategy and the potential service disruption of the Lag strategy.

Example: A digital marketing agency is consistently signing one new client per month. Instead of hiring a full-time employee upfront (Lead) or waiting until everyone is burnt out (Lag), they use a match strategy. They start by bringing in a trusted freelancer for 10 hours a week. Then, as the client base grows, they slowly increase the freelancer’s hours until it makes sense to offer them a full-time position.

4. Hybrid approaches (flexible)

A hybrid (or adjustment) strategy involves combining elements of the above to fit the specific project context. This is often the most realistic approach for dynamic project environments.

Best for: Most project-based work, where different phases might have different levels of uncertainty.

Example: A construction company is building a new office block. They use a Lead strategy for the foundational work, hiring all the necessary groundworkers in advance because they know this phase is critical and can’t be delayed. However, for the interior finishing, they use a Match strategy, hiring specialist painters and electricians in small teams as each floor becomes ready, avoiding having expensive skilled labor sitting idle.

How to master the capacity planning process

Like most things in projects, having a structured process is key. Here are some common steps you can take to help you master capacity planning and decide which approach is best for your situation:

Map out your future business needs

Before you can plan your capacity, you need to know exactly what’s coming down the pipeline. For most organizations, this means regular sit downs with sales, marketing, or leadership teams to understand the pipeline of new clients or the upcoming strategic business aims.

Best practice tips:

Work with stakeholders to understand the long-term business roadmap, diving into what is required, when, and if possible, the size and scale of individual work items.
Take time to clearly understand the required quality standards. This will help you understand the ‘type’ of resources you need. For example, whether you can get away with hiring a junior developer vs. a more seasoned one.

Real-life example: John, the delivery director, sits down with the sales team to assess the pipeline for new website development clients. Given the organization’s growth objectives, the sales team is working hard to increase their pipeline, anticipating a 15% increase in activity from Q1 next year.

Assess current capacity

With a view of upcoming requirements identified, you need a clear picture of the resources you currently have available now. This involves measuring the bandwidth of your team, as well as the availability of the tools, facilities, materials, and budget they need to support them.

Best practice tips:

Start by getting a clear understanding of the resources available today, whether that’s a clear picture of your team, current stock levels, or even utilization of key software licenses. For teams, combine it with a skills matrix so you know exactly what every team member specializes in.
For people resources, reviewing things like timesheets is a great way to understand how much time your team spends on different types of work.
Like you did with requirements capturing, make sure you focus on resource specification and quality, to know what level of resources you have at your disposal.

Real-life example: John takes a look over his current team to understand who he has at his disposal and how much capacity they have. In general, John has a junior team that is pretty busy, each managing multiple projects at a time. They’re also maximizing all of their current project management tool licenses, so they may need to increase that if more people come in.

Forecast future demand

With the requirements captured in the first step, you now need to convert that into real demand to answer the question of “do we have enough?” This looks different from sector-to-sector, with estimating people resources a little different from estimating materials.

Best practice tips:

If you’re working in a project-based team, use data and lessons learned from past projects to make more accurate estimates.
In the same vein, use your team to support the project estimation process. The people doing the work often have the best sense of how long it will take.
Remember to factor in "non-project" work like meetings, training, admin, and team absences (holidays, sick leave). As such, don’t assume 100% availability, and instead, plan for 70-80% of a person’s time being available for project work.

Real-life example: With a 15% increase in sales demand, John estimates the team will likely end up with ~eight additional projects on the go at any one time. Looking back at their past work stack, in any eight projects, typically five of them are “large”, and need a dedicated project manager, while three are small, which could be covered by one PM alone.

Beyond just helping you better plan for your project’s needs, capacity planning can change your team’s mindset and unlock productivity.

Identify gaps and risks

Now it’s time to compare your future demand with your current capacity. While it would be great if the two matched, in most instances they don’t, with either too much or too little capacity.

Best practice tips:

When completing your gap analysis, look for both quantity and quality gaps. You might have enough people, but do they have the right skills and experience?
Prioritize your resource needs. If you can’t fill every gap, which ones are most critical to the project’s success?
Document the consequences of not filling a gap. Will it delay the projects? Reduce the quality? This helps in making a business case for our next step.

Real-life example: By John’s math, he’ll need an additional six project managers to meet the 15% sales increase objectives. While most of John’s team are relatively junior, he believes bringing in at least two more senior project managers will make delivery faster, while also providing additional mentorship and support to junior team members.

Create an action plan

If you’ve identified any gaps, next you need to make an action plan to plug them. In most instances, this could involve hiring new staff, reallocating existing team members, purchasing tools, or even recommending adjusting the business roadmap.

Best practice tips:

Evaluate multiple options to solve your problems. For example, could you cross-train an existing team member instead of hiring a new one? Could you buy used office furniture instead of new?
Think about long-term solutions, not short term ones. Making a short-term, costly hire might solve an immediate problem but could create budget issues later.
Work with stakeholders to develop options. This helps you check your own blind spots while also getting early buy in before formal decisions are made.

Real-life example: John suggests putting an advert out for two new senior project managers to join his team. This would mean they were up and running ahead of the project increase to avoid any delays (Lead strategy). He knows the other four junior roles are faster to hire, so he decides to hold off on those until the demand begins flowing through (Match/Lag strategy).

Monitor and adjust

Capacity planning is not a one-and-done activity — it’s an ongoing process that needs refining and adapting as things change. Regularly align with stakeholders on their requirements, adjust your capacity and demand equations, and take proactive actions to keep you ahead of the curve.

Best practice tips:

Hold regular capacity review meetings (e.g., weekly or bi-weekly) to discuss current workloads and upcoming demand.
Use project management software with real-time resource allocation to keep your demand and capacity in balance. This is where tools like Planio come in, as a central place to plan, store, and report on project work that’s in progress. On top of that, use Gantt charts and Kanban boards to create future product roadmaps that map out future, long-term requirements.

Real-life example: John sets up a monthly meeting with the sales team to keep on top of future requirements and pipelines. He uses Planio to show all the projects and tasks his team are working on, with reports showing how the team’s workload evolves and changes over time.

Common capacity planning mistakes to avoid

Capacity planning is an essential discipline for managing risks and delivering successful projects, but it’s not without its challenges.

Here are some common pitfalls to avoid:

Treating capacity planning as a one-time setup exercise. Proper capacity planning isn’t just a box to tick — it’s an ongoing process that ensures you have the right people, tools, and time to meet project demands without burning out your team.
Overestimating team efficiency. Don’t assume your team members are productive robots. You must factor in meetings, admin, emails, and learning curves. Planning for 70-80% capacity is more realistic.
Underestimating dependencies. A delay in one project can have a domino effect on others. Ensure you understand how different resource needs are connected across projects to spread your resources accordingly.
Ignoring skill and quality levels. Assigning a junior team member to a senior-level task won’t work, even if they have the “capacity.” The same is true for material and facility quality, so don’t view resources as black and white.

With the right tools, it’s much easier to avoid common mistakes and level-up your capacity planning. Planio’s task tracking, reporting, and resource management features enable you to forecast, monitor, and adjust your capacity plans in real-time — keeping projects on track from start to finish.

Try Planio with your own team, free for 30 days (no credit card required!)

How to master the four functions of management

2025-11-26T05:20:43+01:00

Becoming a manager is an exciting step up on the career ladder for most people — but it also comes with a whole host of new responsibilities, tasks, and additional stress.

Nearly half of managers report feeling stressed out from trying to balance their own workload with providing support to their team.

Rather than trying to find some secret or complex corporate theory, it’s best to go back to the basics with the four functions of management: planning, organizing, leading, and controlling.

By understanding and applying these functions, you can move from feeling reactive and overwhelmed to proactive and in control.

Jump to a section:

What are the four functions of management?

The four functions of management (planning, organizing, leading, and controlling) describe the key responsibilities and skills required to be a great manager.

These core management fundamentals were first identified by a French mining engineer named Henri Fayol in the early 20th century. He was one of the first people to analyze management as a distinct set of skills that could be learned and developed.

Fayol argued that no matter the industry or the size of the company, all managers perform the same fundamental activities to achieve their goals.

These four functions are:

Planning: Deciding on the objectives and the course of action to achieve them.
Organizing: Coordinating the resources—people, tools, and budget—to execute the plan.
Leading: Motivating, guiding, and inspiring the team to perform at their best.
Controlling: Monitoring progress against the plan and making adjustments as needed.

These functions aren’t a checklist, they’re a continuous cycle. You plan a project, organize the resources, lead the team through execution, and control the outcomes.

The outcomes then inform your next round of planning, and the process begins again.

Understanding this framework is essential for any new manager because it:

Provides a clear structure for your role. Knowing your core responsibilities gives you a mental map for what you should be focusing on and when.
Helps you prioritize. You can better distinguish between urgent day-to-day tasks and important strategic activities.
Ensures balance. A broad understanding of all of your potential tasks helps prevent you from getting stuck in one area (like constant planning) at the expense of others (like leading your team).
Guides you toward proactive leadership. Instead of just fighting fires, this framework encourages you to anticipate challenges and build systems for success.
Helps you stay in control. Having a framework ensures you and your team stay aligned, helping you stay calm under pressure, reduce stress, and avoid burnout.

The four functions of management explained (with examples)

While this system probably seems overly basic compared to other management styles or processes, it’s a mistake to overlook it. Instead, a solid grasp of each of the four functions of management gives you the foundation you need to help your team succeed.

Let’s take a deeper dive into each function, the key responsibilities and skills associated with it, and how they apply to your role as a project manager or team lead.

The four functions of management offer a timeless blueprint to help you stay grounded.

Planning: Setting objectives and planning your course of action

Planning is the foundation of everything else. It’s where you define what you want to achieve and how you’re going to get there. Without a solid plan, your team is just a group of people doing tasks without a shared purpose. A good plan aligns everyone and provides a roadmap to follow.

Key responsibilities:

Setting clear, measurable, and achievable goals (for example, by using the SMART framework)
Forecasting and prioritizing future needs, opportunities, and risks
Developing strategies and action plans to meet objectives
Creating budgets and allocating financial resources
Defining the scope of a project or initiative

Skills to help you succeed in planning:

Skill	Description	Example
Strategic thinking	The ability to see the big picture and connect your team's work to the company's wider goals, rather than just focusing on tactical tasks.	Instead of just assigning tasks for a new website launch, you step back and first define the project goals, objectives, and scope, to form a 90-day plan.
Data analysis	Using performance metrics and historical data to make informed forecasts and decisions.	You analyze data from your last three projects to set a realistic budget and timeline for the next one.
Risk management	Proactively identifying potential problems that could derail your plan and developing contingency plans.	You identify that a key developer leaving is a major risk to your project timeline, so you plan to cross-train another team member.
Decision making	The ability to evaluate different options and choose the most effective course of action.	When faced with a choice between two software vendors, you methodically compare cost, features, and support, to come to an objective decision.

Organizing: Structuring and coordinating resources

Once you have a plan, the next step is to organize your resources to make it happen. This is about creating structure: who will do what, what tools do they need, and how will everyone work together?

Project management tools like Planio help you organize your project’s tasks, goals, and objectives. This way there’s no confusion about what needs to get done, when, and by whom.

Key responsibilities:

Designing governance, workflows, and processes
Defining roles and responsibilities for each team member
Delegating tasks effectively based on skills and workload
Allocating resources like people, equipment, and technology
Establishing communication channels within the team and with stakeholders

Skills to help you succeed in organizing:

Skill	Description	Example
Process mapping	The ability to visualize and document workflows to identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement.	You set up a Kanban board to visualize your team’s work, identifying bottlenecks and supporting workload management.
Delegation	Setting clear roles and responsibilities, then trusting your team and giving them the autonomy to complete their work.	Instead of reviewing every single line of code yourself, you delegate code reviews to your senior developers, empowering them and freeing up your time.
Communication	Clearly explaining roles, responsibilities, and expectations to ensure everyone is aligned, and create mechanisms to stay up to date and collaborate as a team.	You create a project communication plan to outline who gets what information, when, and in what format, preventing miscommunication.
Resource management	Effectively assigning and managing your available resources to maximize productivity.	You use a shared resource calendar to track team availability, ensuring you don’t overcommit your designer to too many tasks at the same time.

Leading: Motivating and inspiring team members

Leading is the human side of management. You can have the best plan and the most organized structure in the world, but without effective leadership, your team won’t be motivated to perform—- this is the difference between being a manager and a leader.

Leading is about influencing, inspiring, and guiding your team toward the shared vision you established in the planning phase.

Key responsibilities:

Communicating the vision and goals to the team
Motivating and inspiring team members to do their best work
Coaching and developing individual skills and careers
Resolving conflicts and fostering a positive team culture
Recognizing and rewarding good performance

Skills to help you succeed in Leading:

Skill	Description	Example
Emotional intelligence (EQ)	The ability to understand your emotions and the emotions of others to guide your communication and management style.	You notice a team member seems disengaged and stressed. Instead of ignoring it, you have a private conversation, understand their challenges, and put actions in place to resolve them.
Active listening	Genuinely hearing what your team members are saying (and not saying) to understand their perspectives and concerns.	During a daily stand-up, a developer says their task is "fine" but you pick up on their hesitant tone. You follow up with them one-on-one and discover they’re stuck on a technical issue they were afraid to mention.
Coaching	Helping team members grow by providing constructive feedback and guidance rather than just giving orders.	A junior project manager struggles with running meetings effectively. Instead of taking over, you coach them on creating an agenda and facilitating discussion.
Conflict resolution	The ability to mediate disagreements and find solutions that work for everyone involved.	After two team members disagree on the best technical approach for a new feature, you facilitate a discussion where both can present their views and guide them to a collaborative agreement.

Controlling: Monitoring progress and making adjustments

Controlling is about making sure everything is on track. It involves monitoring performance, comparing it against the plan, and making corrective adjustments when things go off course.

This function closes the loop, providing the data and insights you need for future planning. But remember, effective control isn’t about micromanagement; it’s about visibility and agility.

For example, Planio includes powerful Agile metrics and charts to show you if your project is progressing as planned or if you’re running into scope creep, resource limitations, or other common issues.

Key responsibilities:

Setting performance standards and key performance indicators (KPIs)
Monitoring progress against goals and deadlines
Conducting quality assurance checks
Analyzing variances between the plan and actual results
Providing feedback and implementing corrective actions

Skills to help you succeed in Controlling:

Skill	Description	Example
Analytical skills	The ability to interpret data and performance metrics to identify trends and the root causes of problems.	You review the project’s milestone tracker and see that the team is falling behind schedule. You analyze the data to pinpoint which tasks are taking longer than estimated.
Attention to detail	Noticing small deviations from the plan before they become major issues.	You review a draft of a Project Sponsor update pack and catch a small but critical data error that could have caused unnecessary concerns.
Problem-solving	Identifying the root cause of an issue and implementing an effective solution.	After discovering the project is behind schedule, you facilitate a team brainstorming session to find ways to get back on track, such as re-prioritizing tasks or simplifying a feature.
Constructive feedback	Communicating performance issues clearly and supportively, focusing on improvement rather than blame.	You need to address a team member’s missed deadlines. You schedule a one-on-one and say, "I’ve noticed you've missed the last two deadlines. Let's talk about what's getting in the way and how I can help you."

How to become a better manager using the four functions

The best managers are constantly looking for ways to improve their skills. Here are some simple, attainable ways you can start strengthening each of the four functions right away.

How to improve your planning skills

Planning is a mix of data and people, ensuring you use all the information at your fingertips to lay out the best path possible. Then, once you’re happy, engage your stakeholders and team to bring everyone on board.

Use data to build a plan: Use performance data from your project management tool, CRM, or analytics software to create a project plan with data-backed timelines, budgets, and resource forecasts.
Involve stakeholders early: Compile a list of your key stakeholders and schedule a kickoff call and/or one-on-one meetings. You should also make sure the stakeholders sign off on your project documentation, including a project charter, scope document, and stakeholder management plan.
Revisit plans regularly: Schedule recurring weekly or biweekly meetings with your team to review progress against the plan. Use what you learn in these meetings to update project plans, risk logs, and stakeholder communications plans.

How to improve your organizing skills

Organizing is all about getting the right people in the right place to maximize your chances of success. Create structures, define workflows, and document key ways of working to get yourself set up.

Document key processes: Take time with your team to map out recurring workflows (such as bug fixes or content publishing). Make sure to store these workflows as a simple flowchart or checklist in a shared space (like a Planio Wiki) that anyone on the team can find.
Clarify roles and responsibilities: List out team members with key project tasks. Using a template like a RACI chart (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) can eliminate confusion about who is supposed to do what.
Create a resource management plan: Document both human and technical resources that your project needs to succeed. Make a plan to acquire, allocate, and reallocate resources throughout the project.

How to improve your leading skills

As we mentioned earlier on, leading is all about the human side of being a manager, building strong relationships that inspire trust and connection across the team.

Build trust through transparency: Get an understanding of how your team wants to work together. An “open-door” culture where team members have psychological safety, can provide the confidence to raise issues and provide honest feedback without fear.
Lead by example: Define your own management style, and set non-negotiables for how you’ll work everyday. You can set the tone with your team by role-modeling the values, actions, and behaviors you expect (e.g., meeting deadlines, communicating respectfully).
Invest in team development: Use regular one-on-one meetings to understand each team member’s career goals and skill gaps. Then, create a personal development plan for each team member with clear goals for training, mentoring, or taking on new challenges.

How to improve your controlling skills

As you move through your work, the controlling function will become essential for spotting when things are going off track. As a manager, you have to be careful here, ensuring you keep control without drifting into micromanagement territory.

Use project management tools: Planio provides a clear and actionable project dashboard, Agile charts and progress reports, and collaborative tools like chat and file-sharing to give you visibility into all of the critical aspects of your project.
Set clear benchmarks: Your initial project plan should have clearly defined goals, milestones, and KPIs. However, at regular intervals, it’s important to sit down with your team to monitor performance, using data-driven metrics to keep things objective and minimize emotion.
Act quickly on performance issues: Your project management tool and KPIs should inform regular check-ins with your team. Don’t be afraid to step in on problems early. It’s better to solve a small problem with effective feedback, then be stuck dealing with a project-derailing crisis.

Common mistakes new managers make (and how to avoid them)

As you start applying these functions, it’s easy to fall into a few common traps. Being aware of them is the first step to avoiding them. Here are the mistakes we see most frequently, and some expert tips to avoid them:

Problem	Solution
Focusing too much on one function. Some managers love to plan but hesitate to lead. Others are great at leading but neglect the controlling function.	How to avoid it: Consciously review your week. Have you spent time on all four areas? If you’ve been stuck in planning meetings all week, make sure you schedule time to check in with your team (Leading) and review progress (Controlling).
Micromanaging instead of organizing and leading. This often comes from a fear of letting go of the work you used to do. You end up telling people how to do everything instead of clarifying what needs to be done and trusting them to do it.	How to avoid it: Focus on outcomes, not activities. Delegate tasks clearly and give your team the autonomy to find their own solutions.
Avoiding difficult conversations. It’s uncomfortable to give negative feedback or address conflict, so many new managers put it off. Ultimately, this hurts team morale and performance and will create bigger problems down the line.	How to avoid it: Reframe feedback as a tool for growth, not criticism. Use frameworks like the "Situation-Behavior-Impact" model to keep feedback objective and constructive.
Ignoring data when making decisions. Going with your "gut" can be tempting, but it’s often unreliable and can lead to biased decisions.	How to avoid it: Make a habit of asking, "What data do we have to support this?" and use trusted decision-making frameworks to come to an objective solution that removes your own bias.
Not adapting to change. A plan is a guide, not a sacred text. Sticking to a plan that is clearly not working because you’re afraid to change course is a recipe for disaster.	How to avoid it: Build regular reviews into your process (Controlling) and create a culture where the team feels safe pointing out when the plan isn’t working.

Being a good manager isn’t about being perfect — it’s about learning, adapting, and growing alongside your team.

The bottom line: Management is a constantly evolving role

Being a good manager isn’t about being perfect — it’s about learning, adapting, and growing alongside your team.

The four functions of management offer a timeless blueprint to help you stay grounded. They are your compass for navigating the complexities of your new role, helping you build a high-performing team and deliver outstanding results.

At Planio, we know that great managers need great tools to help them. That’s why we’ve built a platform that supports all four functions of management, including:

Project Planning with Gantt charts and roadmaps
Organizing tasks and workflows with agile project management features
Controlling with real-time progress reporting, notifications, and dashboard
Communication and collaboration that make Leading with confidence simple.

Try Planio with your own team, free for 30 days (no credit card required!)

How to make the perfect daily schedule for yourself (free templates)

2025-11-12T05:20:43+01:00

Project managers, and the teams they work with, are under extreme pressure to perform, which is why time management is such an important skill to master.

Unfortunately, research has found that most people are only truly productive for two hours and 48 minutes a day.

While it’s easy to blame distractions, meetings, and the never-ending stream of “urgent” requests for our lack of time to get meaningful work done, there’s another less-obvious culprit: your schedule.

Rigid daily schedules seem like time management 101. But in reality, most schedules are divorced from reality and lack the flexibility needed to deal with your actual daily responsibilities.

But does that mean you should give in to daily chaos? Not at all. There are better approaches to scheduling your day that combine structure and flexibility and are tailored to your specific role, goals, and responsibilities.

Jump to a section:

Why daily schedules are so important (and why most don’t work)

A daily schedule is a template that breaks your day up into blocks of different types of work.

Whereas a static schedule stays the same every day, a daily schedule is completed at the start of every day, allowing you to mix existing commitments with items on your to-do-list, while saving space for high-priority curveballs.

25% of people admit to abandoning their daily schedule as soon as an urgent task comes up — a proper template can help keep you on track.

Done right, setting a daily schedule helps you focus on your immediate priorities, while providing structure to avoid procrastination, and day-to-day variety to boost motivation.

Here are some of the other benefits a daily schedule offers:

Take advantage of your most productive times of the day. We all have different working styles — and that includes when we’re most productive. A good daily schedule protects your most productive hours so you can use them to make progress on the work that matters.
Block out distractions and limit procrastination. If you follow the same schedule every day, or worse, have no structure at all, it’s easy to get distracted and become a victim of procrastination. A daily schedule combines structure and variety to keep you stay on track without becoming stale.
Minimize the number of meetings and time spent communicating. While certain meetings get booked in advance, setting a daily schedule allows you to block time for focused work. This boosts productivity and ensures you make time to get your own tasks done, too.
Reduce stress and build a better work-life balance. Being disorganized and feeling overwhelmed are two of the main drivers of stress and overwork. A daily schedule creates structure, helping you feel in control while optimizing the amount you can get done during the working day.
Develop strong and healthy habits. A good daily schedule isn’t all about work, but can also include personal tasks too, such as housework, family errands, exercise, and diet. Creating structure and repetition around these tasks helps form consistent habits, which, in turn, form daily routines that maximize your time.
Set firmer boundaries. For many, feeling overworked comes from a lack of boundaries. When the pressure of a growing to-do list piles up, it’s hard to say “no” to those around us. But, with a daily schedule, you have real data to prove you’re at capacity, making it easier to have difficult conversations and set clear boundaries.

Deep down, we all know the value of following a schedule. So why do they rarely stick?

In our experience, most schedules fail for two reasons.

First, most people overestimate what they can do in a day. When you set the bar too high, you immediately fall behind, become demotivated, and give up in the first few days.

Second, it’s too easy to forget to add the “small stuff” to your schedule. If you don’t leave a buffer for random phone calls, tech issues, or the odd urgent requirement, you create a schedule that’s not fit for real life.

Both these issues are especially dangerous for people who work on projects, where no two days are ever truly the same.

So, why did we ever think a static schedule would actually work?

Unfortunately, research has found that most people are only truly productive for two hours and 48 minutes a day.

Let’s dive more into daily schedules to see how structure and flexibility can provide the answer to maximizing your daily productivity.

Why you should be using a daily schedule template

The best, most-organized people look for the most efficient way through any problem. In business, but especially in project management, a great way to boost your efficiency is to use templates to reduce the admin of repeatable tasks.

This is the same for creating a daily schedule. Using a template makes it far more efficient to plan your day, turning daily planning into something you can achieve in minutes.

A great daily schedule template could include any of these components:

Blocked-out time for specific productive work. Most people complain they never have time to “do their actual job.” Putting focused work time front and center of your daily schedule prioritizes those tasks.
Meetings and open time for collaboration. For most professionals, working with others is a core part of the job. Rather than letting that take over your life, include dedicated time in your daily schedule to connect, both in team meetings and 1:2:1 meetings.
Recurring tasks, such as emails, reports, updating docs, etc. Alongside productive work and meetings, we all have recurring tasks to complete on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Flexible time to catch up on other tasks or responsibilities. Remember that buffer time we mentioned earlier? Well, here it is as a key component of any good daily schedule.
Personal life admin. If you need a daily schedule that extends outside the 9-5, you can also include personal life admin such as health appointments, school runs, gym classes, and housework.
Bonus — daily goals and priorities. Once your day is mapped out, many people like setting clear goals and priorities to create extra focus and a sense of achievement. This is completely optional, but works well for those who like a target to aim at.

That’s a lot to include in a schedule. But the truth is, you don’t have to include it all. Remember, we’re talking about creating a template, not a rigid schedule that you’re bound to fail to keep up with.

How to make the perfect daily schedule for yourself

Follow these steps to build the perfect schedule template and start benefiting from more focus, control, and structure in your daily life.

Gather data from your to-do list, calendar, and project management tool

Maintaining a structured daily schedule requires you to have a good grasp of your core data. Before you start plugging in tasks to your daily schedule, you need to understand what’s demanding your time in the first place. The goal is to create a big list of all the actionable tasks you have on your plate.

A great way to do this is to complete an initial analysis of your current to-do list, calendars, and the tasks in your project management tool.

Here are some tips to help:

Master task management. Knowing how to break down your projects into tasks will enable you to build out your personal to-do-list. Check out our Planio Task Management guide to help set the foundation.
Level up your to-do list. Not all to-do lists are born equal. To make your daily schedule more effective, make sure your to-dos are clear, concise, and actionable to maximize your productivity and effectiveness.

Prioritize the tasks in your backlog

Once you have a clear view on what needs doing, it’s time to prioritize. In any single day, you’ll only have the capacity to tick off 1-3 high-priority items, so you need to work out which ones to tackle and which ones to push to later in the week.

Here are some tips to help:

Learn to prioritize well. Our Planio guide to Prioritization offers some great advice to see your tasks, projects, and product features through different themes and work out what generates the most value. For high-value tasks, you can then manage them closely with tight deadlines, whereas low-priority tasks can work away in the background.
Use Planio to help. Planio’s Task Management features are perfect for teams, and individuals, that need to list, structure, and prioritize tasks and features. Use custom and pre-defined task qualities to set priorities, track progress, and define your goals. Then, view all of your tasks on an Agile board or on a more traditional calendar or waterfall view.

Most people overestimate what they can do in a day.

Make sure every main task has a realistic deadline

Putting a date against key tasks is the perfect way to give them the focus they need. Not only does this help sharpen the mind, but it gives others around you a sense of what you’re working on and what your current priorities are.

Pro tip: Low-priority tasks don’t always need a firm deadline. Set one out in the future as a reminder to revisit the task and see if it’s still a priority or not.

Here are some tips to help:

Work on your time estimation skills. For those working in project management, being able to break down a task, estimate it, and set a realistic deadline is a key skill. You can learn more about estimating and building task schedules here.
Take advantage of Planio’s calendar view. The Planio calendar is a great tool for visualizing your tasks, deadlines, and milestones in one place. It gives you and your stakeholders a single view of what’s on, how you’re progressing, and the deadlines you’re currently working too.

Cluster recurring tasks together

Last, but definitely not least, work to get a clear view of your recurring tasks. This could include time spent on emails, reports and project status updates, updating documents, completing timesheets, etc. These are essential tasks that need dedicated space in your schedule to ensure you do them well!

Pro tip: Look for opportunities to automate these tasks. Alongside identifying your recurring tasks, think about the ways you could automate them to save additional time. Especially for tasks that are admin heavy, tools like Planio have configurable workflows to automate task sign-offs, creating reports, and updating stakeholders.

Add time blocks to your schedule for different priority levels

With a clear view of what’s going on in your day, it’s time to start actively blocking time in your daily schedule template to get things done.

Knowing which tasks go where is a skill you’ll learn over time as you become more familiar with when you’re best at completing different types of work.

Here are some tips to help:

Try time blocking. This is a technique that divides your day into “chunks” — each of which is allocated to specific tasks. For example, you’ll schedule time for “focused work” where you’ll work on your top priorities, as well as include chunks of time for meetings, emails, etc.
Be honest about your own working style. When planning your day, it’s important to know the types of tasks you do and don’t enjoy doing, and use your energy peaks effectively. Dive deep into our work styles article to understand what work motivates you to plan it into your day at the right time.

Include flexible time and buffers for breaks and resets

As you’re planning your day, make sure you include both buffer time and dedicated windows for breaks and resets. While it sounds simple, both of these ensure you have time to recharge while also allowing you the flexibility to handle what life throws at you.

Here are a few reasons why adding flex time to your daily schedule is so important:

Work-life balance. Without knowing it, adding breaks is actually a core component of a healthy work-life balance. It sets the tone that stepping away from your desk is ok, giving you short windows to reconnect with the outside world, your family, and friends.
Avoiding burnout. Breaks and buffers also help you avoid the trap that is burnout. Burnout (physical and emotional exhaustion that occurs from long-term stress at work) is especially common in high-intensity jobs such as project management, so we’d suggest reading our Project Management Burnout article to ensure you put measures in place to protect yourself.

Make sure your team knows your schedule

For a daily schedule to be effective, those around you need to understand what you’re doing, when you’re doing it, and how it works. This gives you a greater chance of successfully managing your day, while optimizing time together as a team.

Here are some tips to help:

Solve conflicts between meetings and productive time. If the rest of your team doesn’t know when you’re in “focused time”, they could inadvertently distract you or try to schedule meetings during that time. A realistic schedule is often a negotiation between you and your team’s needs.
Set ground rules. Your productive time needs to be sacred, and your team should know and expect you to be harder to reach during these times. It’s ok to not want to be disturbed, so set clear boundaries to give your productivity time the priority it deserves.
Build team rituals. On the flip side, time with your team is equally important, and you should ensure you’re present throughout those windows. Within your regular tasks, work with your team to create team rituals that encourage collaboration, connection, and togetherness.

Track your time and use the data to adjust your daily schedules

As you get started with your daily schedule, your early estimates may be a little off. This is to be expected, as no one gets it right the first time. To help, it’s good to get some data on how long certain tasks are taking, giving you accurate numbers to plan from in the future.

Here are some tips to help:

Check in on reporting and analytics. Whether you use a project management tool or a task management to-do list, use data on overdue or late tasks to dive into areas that are taking longer than planned. This will highlight “problem areas” for you to address in the future.
Track task time with Planio. Planio offers built-in task time tracking. Once you’ve set up your tasks, milestones, and deadlines, simply start an in-app timer to track how long you’ve spent on it. Once finished, you can add notes and report on your “actual time” to see how it compared to what you had estimated.

See all your time stamps, notes, and spent time stats in one place.

Steal these free daily schedule templates

This guide is more about organizing your tasks and being aware of all of the many things that will compete for your attention each day.

When it comes to actually creating a schedule with that information, start with a high-level breakdown of your daily priorities and obligations.

How you track these tasks during the day is up to you. Some people prefer to schedule blocks of time per hour, list tasks by priority, or use a daily to-do list to break out tasks and projects.

How you organize it is up to you and how you work. However, here are the best scenarios for each:

Use a time-based schedule if you have a lot of meetings. This will help you be realistic about what you can get done given your other obligations.
Use a priority-based schedule if you have tight deadlines. This will put the focus on your most important work, ensuring you don’t miss important deadlines.
Use a prioritized to-do list if you need more flexibility. This allows you to pick and choose tasks that fit within the demands of the rest of your team.

Best practices for sticking with your daily schedule

Balancing the changing demands of daily life while staying productive, calm, and organized isn’t easy, but with a daily schedule, it’s definitely more manageable. Alongside a template and following the process, here are some best practices to help you stay on track:

Reflect on your daily energy levels. We all have a limited amount of daily energy, so you need to protect that energy for the things that matter. Don’t try to do too much in a day, and prioritize the things that will have the most impact.
Stay flexible and adjust regularly. Following a daily schedule is a flexible process, so make sure you remain flexible yourself, and don’t be afraid to adjust when needed.
Keep daily high-priority tasks to a minimum. There’s only so much you can do in a day, so set no more than 1-3 high-priority tasks each day to avoid burnout.
Don’t forget about breaks and buffers. Talking of burnout, to avoid becoming too stressed and to maximize your productivity, factor in regular breaks and buffer time — and make sure you actually take them.
Use time tracking to create better estimates. Data is king in modern business, so use tools like Planio’s time tracker to get real data on how long tasks take you. This will help you improve future estimates and further optimize your daily schedule.
Don’t let a bad day ruin your schedule. Even with the world’s best daily schedule, there will still be days when it feels like it’s all going wrong. Don’t let one bad day ruin your structure, get back on it the next day with your new daily schedule.

If you need extra help keeping your work, and your team’s work organized, Planio is the perfect tool to help. With features for task management, project planning, collaboration, and document storage, it’s the one-stop-shop for team productivity that helps focus on what matters every day!

Try Planio with your own team — free for 30 days (no credit card required!)

What does a product owner do (and how to be a good one)

2025-10-29T05:20:43+01:00

Product owners are the key liaison between users, business stakeholders, and the development team. This is a mission critical role that is central to a product’s strategy, roadmap, and success.

Unfortunately, the product owner role is often confused with other similar delivery roles, such as project manager, program manager, and product manager.

If you’re new to the product owner role, or you’re thinking of hiring one in your organization, then this article is for you.

Jump to a section:

What does a product owner do?

A product owner is accountable for maximizing the value of a product. As the liaison between users, business stakeholders, and the development team, the product owner communicates the product’s vision and goal, acts as the champion of the product’s users, and prioritizes the work of the development team.

According to Scrum Guide best practices, the product owner role should be held by a single person, not a committee.

That individual controls and prioritizes the product backlog, and therefore has the authority to make decisions on behalf of the organization.

But, it’s important to remember that the Scrum Guide definition of a product owner was designed for teams who religiously follow the Scrum framework.

While the responsibilities are fairly consistent, the day-to-day duties of a product owner often vary from organization to organization.

For example, for a small product, alongside more tactical tasks, the Product Owner may also be responsible for strategic activities such as defining the product strategy, managing budgets, and creating business cases. When a product is large and multifaceted, those responsibilities may fall to a product manager instead (more on that later!)

As a general rule, here are the typical strategic and tactical responsibilities expected of a product owner:

Strategic:	Tactical:
Define and champion the business case for products and features	Prioritize backlog items for upcoming sprints
Responsible for the product vision, strategy, and business plan	Define and document requirements and acceptance for product features
Responsible for product performance and revenue	Collaborate with the development team to answer queries
Define user strategy and marketing or engagement plans	Conduct user research and advocate for user’s needs in the development process
Manage senior stakeholders expectations and provide updates	Manage Agile ceremonies, such as product showcases and retrospectives
Manage budgets and resource plans	Accept work and manage release cycles
Accountable for decision-making, with a focus on driving maximum value	Facilitate decision-making with objective data, focused on value

The most important skills for product owners to have

Regardless of the exact role and responsibilities, all good product owners need a common set of soft and hard skills.

Here are the top five most important ones to succeed:

Communication. To share the product vision and user perspective with team members such as developers, designers, testers, and business representatives.
Collaboration. To work effectively with the development and release management team to define, design, and release new features.
Analytical Thinking & Problem-Solving. To understand technical problems, review data, and define complex requirements.
Leadership. To inspire team members, make decisions, manage conflicts, and effectively communicate the product strategy.
Product Knowledge. Gained over time, to better understand users, solution designs, acceptance criteria, and options analysis.

Running across the top of all of these responsibilities and skills, a product owner should constantly focus on delivering value — primarily to users, but also to the organization.

For example, when prioritizing backlog items, the focus should be prioritizing those with the most value, rather than the ones that are cheapest or fastest to deliver.

Product owner vs. Product manager

The product owner and product manager roles frequently get confused. This is understandable, as many organizations define the roles differently, and sometimes even merge them into one.

But most commonly, the differentiation between a product owner and a product manager is based on who carries out the strategic and tactical activities. Where the roles are split:

A product owner manages the tactical execution of the product strategy, breaking it down into objectives and delivering new features through an Agile software development framework, such as Scrum.
A product manager focuses on the long-term strategy, vision, and roadmap for a product, while also managing budgets, business cases, and resource plans.

Does every team need a product owner and a product manager?

Put simply, no they don’t — it often depends on the size, scale, and complexity of the product and how much there is to do. Let’s look at an example.

Imagine you’re working on a mobile app for an e-commerce brand. If the app is small, with 30 products, and 1,000 monthly customers, a single person could probably manage the strategic and tactical elements of the product development.

But, if it was a large e-commerce app, with 3,000 products and 100,000 monthly customers, you’ll likely need multiple product owners to oversee changes for each part of the app. For example, one owner for product search, one for search results, and one for basket & checkout.

A product manager would work above these product owners, setting strategy, managing budgets, and providing line management support.

The product owner communicates the product’s vision and goal, acts as the champion of the product’s users, and prioritizes the work of the development team.

How to be the best product owner: 10 powerful tactics

The product owner role has been in place for well over 20 years. During that time, lots of best practices have emerged.

Outside the formal roles, responsibilities, and skills, here are some tactical things you can do to be a standout product owner for your company:

1. Get to know the market and USP of your product

The best product owners know their market and the unique selling proposition (USP) for their product inside out. This deep knowledge helps them define and prioritize the right features to deliver maximum value.

2. Use customer research and interviews to dig deeper into user needs

One of the biggest mistakes new product owners make is thinking they instinctively know what their users think (spoiler alert: they don’t!) Instead, the best product owners conduct regular user research, including interviews, surveys, and shadowing, to truly understand what’s important to users now and in the future.

3. Act as the voice of the user every single day

Once product owners know what the customer needs, they champion their opinion at every opportunity. This ensures maximum value is delivered for the user and helps product owners cut through the noise of internal company politics.

4. Practice quick and effective decision-making

In a fortnightly or monthly sprint cycle, there isn’t time to mess around. The best product owners are great decision makers, using data and objective analysis to choose solutions, remove bottlenecks, and support the development team to fix bugs.

5. Become a master of communication and negotiation

As the middleman between users, business, and development stakeholders, top product owners are master negotiators and influencers. It’s impossible to keep everyone happy all the time, so product owners have to also be great at managing trade-offs, communicating tough messages, and prioritizing the right things.

6. Embrace the unknown and learn through experimentation

Most products operate in a competitive market, with things changing daily. The best product owners are comfortable with ambiguity and aren’t afraid to experiment with a new feature, even if it doesn’t quite work out!

7. Make sure you’re regularly available to answer questions

The superpower of any good product owner is being available to support stakeholders and champion your product. Good self-management and acting as a servant leader ensures you’re always available to collaborate and keep the development cycle moving forwards.

8. Know the metrics you need to influence

Whether it’s active users, churn rate, annual recurring revenue, or Agile development metrics such as velocity, digital products have many quantifiable metrics to track. The best product owners know which metrics are most important for their company, and keep them front and center when making key decisions.

9. Understand where the product owner role fits in your organization

Top best product owners know exactly what their roles and responsibilities are. With so much variability across different companies and sectors, being crystal clear on what being a product owner means in your organization is key to success.

10. Use tools to help manage the product development process

The product owner role is a big one that can’t be done from a traditional to-do list. The best product owners use tools like Planio to manage their tasks, features, bugs, and sprint plans all in one place, creating a central space to collaborate, store documents, track metrics, and ultimately, keep the product roadmap on track.

Planio makes it easy to track tasks, groom and schedule backlog tasks, communicate with your team and share knowledge. You can even try Planio with your own team free for 30 days (with no credit card required!)

What a product owner shouldn’t be doing

On the flip side, there are many things that new product owners end up doing that they really shouldn’t be.

Accidentally falling into other roles reduces a product owner’s value, causing features to become delayed or misaligned from your strategy.

Here are some of the common things product owners shouldn’t fall into doing within their day-to-day role:

Getting stuck in the weeds of writing user stories. While a product owner plays a key role in defining, ordering, and prioritizing user stories, they shouldn’t be the ones to fill in all the details. This is often done by a Business Analyst or Tech Lead, freeing up the product owner for other activities.
Adding everyone’s ideas to the product backlog. A product’s backlog is a sacred place. Not every idea needs to be, or even should be, added to it. Using an idea validation method, good product owners should test an idea before formally adding it to the backlog.
Falling into the role of project manager. The role of product owner and project manager often get mixed up, but they’re very different. Product owners shouldn’t spend all their time planning timelines, identifying risks, and managing budgets. Sure, they need to set timing and cost expectations, but it shouldn’t become their main role.
Spending too much time as a subject-matter expert (SME). There’s a fine line between good product knowledge and being an SME. Sometimes product owners get dragged too far the other way. The best product owners bring SMEs into team discussions to shape solutions and solve problems, rather than try to do it all themselves.
Taking over as team manager. While product owners have a natural leadership role, generally, they aren’t line managers to the development team — and nor should they be. Product owners shouldn’t be involved in HR processes, or directly responsible for personal development, discipline, or personal administration.
Writing lines of code. While all the best product owners have technical knowledge, they should not be writing code for new features. If your product owner is spending time coding, they aren’t adding maximum value for users or the business.

All of these roles and tasks take away from the important work that a product owner should be doing.

The product owner role has a blend of business and technical focus, working to communicate, collaborate, prioritize, and approve work that drives the product strategy forwards.

Anything that takes away from that, slows down the entire product development process, eroding the value of the product, and eventually, impacting your competitive advantage, user satisfaction, and revenue.

Anything that takes away from the product owner role, slows down the entire product development process.

The bottom line: Product owners should focus on value

The product owner is an essential part of the product development process, contributing to building awesome products that users love. But the role is often misunderstood and confused with other jobs such as project manager, program manager, and product manager.

This isn’t helped by the fact that the product owner role often varies from organization-to-organization.

When you strip back the different job descriptions, every product owner is ultimately accountable for maximizing the value of a digital product.

From this, you can craft a product owner job description that works for your organization, ensuring you have a point of contact between your users, business stakeholders, and development team, that champions your product and ensures it delivers maximum value.

But remember, all the best product owners use tools to help them define, plan, and deliver their product roadmaps — and Planio is one of the best on the market. With features for agile project delivery, task management, collaboration, chat, document storage, and development repositories, Planio is the perfect tool for building great products that your users will love!

Try Planio with your own team — free for 30 days (no credit card required!)