Here's a rare behind-the-scenes at Diet Doctor post.
We recently met up for our monthly planning days in Karlstad, Sweden. Want to know what we discussed and decided?
Goals
The planning days have two primary goals: first, to decide what to do next, and second, to improve our team by discussing our company purpose, hiring, culture, and so forth.
Preparations and agenda
To achieve these goals we prepare and have a clear agenda. This time all of us answered the following questions before we arrived:
1. What one new thing would make you use the membership every week?
2. What one improvement would you to make to our Low-Carb Guides and Recipes ?
3. What should be our three priorities for next month?
Here's the agenda for the three days:
Monday:- Before 17:00: Preparation for Karlstad Days and individual work
- 17:00 - 18:00: Discuss progress and what we can learn (Andreas)
- 18:00 - 20:00: Dinner (by Kristin at her and Andreas' house)
- Before 09:00: Individual work
- 09:00 - 09:15: Introduction, and suggestions from the last Karlstad Days (Andreas)
- Status Diet Doctor
- Suggestions: 1) Use Parking Lot, 2) Have a "Focus Role", 3) Speak up if frustrated
- 09:15 - 10:45: Product Ideas (Bjarte)
- What one new thing would make you use the membership every week?
- What one improvement would you love us to make to our Guides and Recipe section?
- What other new things should we consider doing and stop doing?
- 10:45 - 11:00: Break
- 11:00 - 12:00: Decide our top three priorities and what to get done next month 1/3 (Andreas)
- 13:00 - 14:30: Decide our top three priorities and what to get done next month, 2/3 (Andreas)
- 14:30 - 14:45: Break
- 14:45 - 16:00: Purpose and Blog (Andreas)
- Discuss our purpose
- Discuss how to improve our blog, social media, and newsletters
- 16:00 - 17:00: Individual work
- 17:00 - 20:00: Dinner (Low-Carb Pizza by Bjarte) and social stuff at the office
- Before 09:00: Individual work
- 09:00 - 10:30: Decide our top three priorities and what to get done for next month, 3/3 (Andreas)
- 10:30 - 10:45: Break
- 10:45 - 12:15: How to Build a Great Company (Bjarte)
- Hire: Who should were hire, where and how? How do we find them?
- Work: Where should we work? What would you love to do more and less of?
- Trust: What are you afraid of? What Diet Doctor failure can you share with us?
- 13:00 - 14:00: Open, unplanned session. What do you want to talk about? (Bjarte). Examples:
- Talk with Andreas or other team members about "smaller" things
- Wild ideas!
- Navigation...
- 14:00 - 15:00: Individual work
- 15:00 - 15:15: How can we improve our Karlstad days? (Bjarte)
- After 15:15: Individual work
The planning days are intense
Our monthly planning days are intense. Some of us often start working before 06:00am and from 9am to 5pm we have team discussions.
After 5pm we do some individual work before building the team through dinner and conversations. Around 9 or 10pm we fall asleep and then do the same the next day.
Our plan for the next two months
Here's a screenshot from Trello (the tool we use for setting priorities) showing what we aim to get done by August 15th:
As you can see, we have three priorities for the next two months:
1) Massively improve the membership,
2) Keto (meaning creating great ketosis related content), and
3) Improve recipes.
The items below each of these three priorities is what we aim to get done by the 15th of August. These are stretch goals and we won't be able to complete all of them, but we're going to work as hard as we can to get as much as possible done.
What do you think we should do next?
We're trying our best to figure out how to make low carb simple for you guys, but what's actually important to you?
Please let us know so that we can faster empower you to revolutionize your health.
More behind the scenes
Do you want to know more about what's happening behind the scenes at Diet Doctor? Tell us what you want to know and we'll try to write about it.
In the meantime, here are some previous behind the scenes posts:
How Can We Make the Membership Insanely Great? Behind the Scenes at Diet Doctor We've Passed 15,000 Members!