Long Suciu spent years at Gartner building the operational infrastructure for a product organization that spanned more than 30 teams and 70 product managers. In this segment of his conversation with Patrycja Radwanska on the Let’s Talk Operations series, he walks through the exact quarterly planning cadence he designed – a system that replaced ad-hoc project sponsorship with structured alignment without making anyone feel like they were spending all their time planning instead of building.
The Problem: Alignment by Hallway Conversation
Before the cadence existed, Gartner’s product organization operated on a model that Suciu describes with the kind of specificity that suggests he has replayed the dysfunction in his head many times. Any product director, any stakeholder with enough organizational gravity, could come up with an idea. They would walk around the building talking to people, selling the concept, trying to get someone to commit resources. There was no formal alignment. No prioritization framework. No cadence. Things just got done sometimes. Or, more frequently, things got started, the sponsoring stakeholder left the company or moved roles, and the project got quietly dropped.
The teams on the receiving end of this were, predictably, frustrated. They would invest months of effort into work that evaporated when the political winds shifted. And the organizational dysfunction was invisible to leadership because the business metrics – revenue, profitability, growth – were all performing well. Operational waste was being covered up by strong business performance, which is exactly the kind of problem that nobody wants to fix until it is far too late to fix it cheaply.
The Design: Three Two-Week Phases
Suciu’s approach started with two constraints. First: one week before the quarter was too short for anyone to plan meaningfully. Second: starting to plan next quarter at the beginning of the current one felt like an overhead sentence. He landed on six weeks as the sweet spot and then divided it into three phases, each designed to build incrementally on the last.
Weeks minus six to minus four: Think. The only instruction was to start thinking about what you might want to do next quarter. Not to align. Not to commit. Not to build a roadmap. Just to think, and to begin identifying who you might need help from. You probably do not know what you need yet, but you probably know that you are going to need analytics, or UX, or DevOps, or that other product area whose backlog you are about to disrupt. The point of this phase was to get conversations happening and to shift people into the right mental framework.
Weeks minus four to minus two: Share. Now you tell everyone else what you are thinking. Not to get agreement, but to create transparency. The distinction matters. Suciu was not asking people to negotiate priorities in this phase. He was asking them to make their intentions visible so that conflicts, dependencies, and opportunities for collaboration could surface naturally instead of being discovered three weeks into the quarter.
Weeks minus two to zero: Solidify. Build your roadmaps. At the start of the quarter, present objectives and roadmaps to leadership, who get the opportunity to challenge, redirect, or confirm – but not to invent from scratch. By this point, the thinking has been done, the dependencies have been surfaced, and the conversations have already happened.
“The quarterly planning process should be thought of as a continuous process. You’re just going from one quarter to another quarter.”
Why It Worked: Planning as Flow, Not Event
The foundational assumption that made the whole system viable was counterintuitive to most of the people who had to use it. Suciu insisted that quarterly planning was not a quarterly event. It was a continuous flow. You were not building objectives from scratch every 13 weeks. You were carrying forward the momentum from the previous quarter, adjusting based on what you learned, and adding new objectives only where the business needed them.
This reframing changed the emotional weight of the process. When people believe every quarter starts from zero, planning feels enormous and burdensome. When they understand that 70% of next quarter’s objectives already exist in some form – they just need refinement and alignment – the overhead shrinks to something manageable.
The tooling started deliberately simple. Google Sheets. Excel. Just enough to capture the initial transparency. Suciu resisted the urge to invest in sophisticated platforms before the behavior was established, because he understood something that many transformation leaders miss: if you build the tool before the habit, you end up with a beautifully configured application that nobody uses. The tool came later, once the cadence had proven itself and the teams were ready for something that could reinforce and automate the behavior they had already adopted.
Cascading Alignment: Sprints, Quarters, Years
Once the quarterly cadence was working, Suciu connected it vertically. Teams work in two-week sprints. The organization works in quarterly cycles. Senior leadership works in annual planning horizons. The cascading alignment meant that annual targets broke down into quarterly objectives, quarterly objectives broke down into sprint work, and a single Jira ticket could be traced all the way up to an organizational goal.
The language problem, however, was one of the most persistent obstacles. At Gartner, the word “objective” and the word “initiative” meant the same thing to most people. An initiative – a two-year project – would be called an objective. If the organization was going to adopt a more modern, outcome-focused approach, the vocabulary had to shift from “what do we want to get done?” to “what outcome do we want to achieve?” And that shift, Suciu admits, took the better part of two years to even begin landing.
The transformation from project alignment to outcome focus was not something he could mandate. It happened incrementally, over six to eight quarters, as business results started fluctuating and leadership naturally began asking “what KPI are we trying to move?” instead of “what project should we fund?” That question – asked often enough by people with enough authority – created the opening for a different way of defining success.
For the full interview breakdown, see our complete Expert Insight with Long Suciu.
Tools Mentioned in the Interview
The following tools and platforms were referenced during this conversation.
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