Planning Boards Overview

Hey, Steve here from Ludi.

We've just released six templates and I want to create a short overview video to walk you through them.

These are, boards that we've created internally to manage our own projects and we thought they might be helpful to other small teams who need to prioritize, tasks.

So in this video I'm just going to give you a quick strikethrough of each template that we're releasing.

But when you go and use the actual template, they all come with their own video, explaining, how to run through them, but also giving you some context, with examples of how we used it.

And, where possible, I'll show the actual board that we created using the template.

Some of these came about organically as we worked through problems.

Other ones have sort of been made after the fact because we saw a pattern of how we were doing decision making.

So sit back, enjoy it, hopefully you see something that would be helpful towards your team.

So the first one up is a simple launch plan.

When we rebranded from Metro Retro to Ludi, there was obviously a lot of considerations we had to make to launch the new brand.

And so we found this process of putting all the tasks down in one area and then looking at what needs to happen before on launch day and then post launch day and then splitting those tasks to different members of the team extremely helpful in what we feel was a very smooth launch of the new domain and new brand.

The next one up is content mapping.

again, related to the website.

We wanted to build a lot of new pages for the site, but we also wanted to make sure that we were, sharing relevant information to the different role types who were coming to visit our site.

so these were specifically about our solutions pages.

And we built a framework where we were looking at the job to be done of a specific use case and then aligning our content, to that specific use case or role.

It's nothing new, but we found that this workflow allowed us to quickly see what product features we could share on the pages that were most relevant to the person who was viewing the page.

Next one is one that I use very often.

So this is a design review format.

And what this essentially does is it allows me to bring in designs, into a static environment.

So extracted from Figma files or extracted from anything that's going to distract other people in the team.

I can lay out some aims of the project, why we're doing the work, I can give some input on the discovery.

So while I was doing the designs, what did I find that might impact the decisions we make.

And then you just follow the format through of like this.

These are the designer's notes, the design team notes.

This is what we're looking at.

And then this is the feedback gathered during this session.

There's just two in this template for the time being, but you can go and duplicate as many as you want depending on how big the session is that you're doing.

the next one is product pricing.

So product pricing is obviously something that affects all SaaS companies and it's not easy.

Everybody knows that.

We used a couple of different templates that then got amalgamated into this one template, which allowed us to lay out, okay, we have these tiers, they are for these specific use cases.

This is the rationale behind them putting all the product features into sort of like a central bucket and then mapping those features to the tiers to make sure that we have this logical progression up through our tiers.

Just a really easy or great way to get a high level overview of your pricing structure.

This is obviously not the final thing that you will use, but it's a good planning process.

Next up is an email content planner.

we found this extremely helpful when we were doing our onboarding emails, for that sort of 30 day trial that we offered.

So we could bring in all of our ideas, we could group those ideas under different content topics and then we could take the topics over the 30 day period and go, right, okay, obviously there's a welcome email when someone first arrives, but then we want to share helpful information throughout that process, imagining what they might be doing or what the user might be doing at that time.

if you have conditional, based emails that get sent out, then there's a bit of a tip here as to how you could potentially use tags to just split those within the grid layout.

The last one, but certainly not the least important is work stream planning.

So, you know, we're a small team and there's a lot of ground to cover in different areas of the business that we need to look at.

And we found this template extremely helpful in making sure that everybody has visibility of all the things we need to be considerate of.

And the work streams are, you know, in this example we've got data, content, website, process, and this template enabled us to go okay, around data.

We need to resolve these issues and then these are the tasks that we can potentially do, that will help impact these issues.

And then if we were to work on these tasks, what would the outcomes be and then, you know, making final decisions in the session to then move over to some sort of prioritization matrix.

So it allows you to think about the outcomes of work that you're going to undertake before you start working on it.

So you're not just blindly working on tasks because they're on a checklist.

It gives you a really high level view of we're going to get the most impact out of making these changes.

And it also becomes a good tracker of potentially next up tasks that you could work on.

So that's an extremely quick strikethrough of the six new templates that we're releasing.

Like I said, each one will have its own explainer video.

we really hope that you find these as helpful as we have that.

Definitely geared more towards small teams who need to make a lot of, high impact decisions quickly.

But your team size could benefit from them as well.

You might just need to reformat them.

The idea is that you take this as a base and adapt it to suit your team.

So I hope you enjoy them.

if you use any of them, we'd love to hear how they've worked out for you.

If you have any suggestions on new templates, this is, like I said, the first six, we've got a couple more that we're busy working on which are much bigger processes that we've gone through, you know, positioning projects, defining your Northstar metric, things like that, which are longer pieces of work.

And as soon as they're ready, we'll also share them with everyone.

Cheers.

Thank you.