Replace Your Planning Framework with AI Orchestration

Every planning season starts with the intention to be more proactive than the last one. It ends the same way: bottoms-up planning first, tops-down at the 11th hour, and a decision framework found online to staple the two together.

Faran Najam, AI Product Leader at Chime, runs annual planning the way he runs customer interviews. Start with the problem, double-click into the supporting evidence, identify who is actually feeling it, then synthesize into themes you can take into an alignment conversation. In this session we'll build an intake funnel that will feed into a strategy doc that you'll feel confident in using as your first working draft. We'll apply judgement along the way, and make way towards making annual planning fun!

What you’ll walk away with:

1. Annual planning is a research problem before it’s a prioritization problem. Treating inputs as evidence, with a named owner and a stated problem behind each one, is what makes the tops-down conversation survivable. Most teams skip straight to ranking and spend the rest of the cycle defending the ranking.
2. The intake funnel is where the leverage is, not the framework. The 11th-hour scramble happens because bottoms-up and tops-down meet for the first time with nothing structured underneath them. Fix the intake and the decision framework stops carrying weight it was never built to carry.
3. Orchestration moves the work, judgment decides it. AI can collect, cluster, and draft at a speed no planning cycle can match on its own, but the calls still belong to you. You’ll see exactly where Faran intervenes and where he lets the funnel run.