My reverse planning process

Or how I go from the dog in the burning house to this guy 😎

Last Saturday was my third anniversary at Float. In the past year, I’ve worked on several projects that I had no prior experience running, such as interviewing my founder and planning live sessions (as a rule, we never say webinar).

While new projects are exciting, they also mean I had to figure out how the hell to get started because I had no idea what I was doing.

A trusty solution is the reverse engineering process my manager, Fio, shared with me. It’s quite simple: start from the end state you want to achieve and then walk backwards through all the steps you need to take.

I tweaked the process a bit by involving everyone’s AI companion, ChatGPT.

My prompt is quite simple:

I’m planning X, but I’ve no idea how to do it. Can you reverse engineer the process so I’ll know what steps to take?

The output is usually satisfactory, giving me enough to build on. From there, I added any steps I think were missing and headed over to Figma.

I map out the steps in Figma, matching the major elements to dates. This helps me note dependencies, e.g., a landing page for a live event going live, so promotions can begin.

With these details outlined, it’s clear who should do what, and then I can start assigning tasks in the project management tool.

This process is not flawless. Several times, I’ve had to put out a fire or three at critical points because

• a dependency didn’t get delivered on time

• a team member was unavailable

• some random thing I could have never accounted for happened e.g. a process changes midday and I can’t adjust in time and there is nothing I can do to stop the train from derailing into the surrounding corn field, combusting in flames and setting this years harvest on fire 🫠 🔥

(I dunno what that was but I had to let it out)

A recent example is the product-focused workshop I am working on.

The landing page was to go live on the 8th of April. The designer was to send me the event image (which was critical for the page) by the 7th. Because it was a new type of design, it had to be signed off by the design director who wanted me to share the copy for the images before he reviewed them. The usual process was for the designer to just create the image which I’d use so I didn’t share the copy beforehand.

A further complication was that the landing page had to be ready in time to be sent out in an email going out on the morning of 8th… New Zealand time, which was essentially the evening of the 7th in my time zone. It was a very stressful time 🥲

Right now, I’m working on tweaking the process so that I have enough time to accommodate changes or roadblocks. I’ll keep you updated!

Also, don’t let my many misadventures discourage you from adopting my reverse engineering technique. It might come in handy for a project you’re unfamiliar with.

Au revoir 👋🏾!

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• I traveled to Ghana with my mum! Our girls’ trip was so much fun 🤩

• I am speaking at Search Africon. If you’re attending too, come and say hi 😃

• I’m taking French classes and it’s been extremely humbling 🥲. I thought it would be a breeze because I took French courses in uni, but I’m blundering my way through right now. Mr Adigun, my secondary school French teacher, would be appalled.

• I baked banana bread! Two actually. I used one as a birthday cake for my niece and the other as a snack for the month.

• I published the first issue of Greenhorn support group, a newsletter for newbies to content marketing. If that’s you, go check it out now 🫵🏾