Previously in this series, we’ve defined your studio purpose, set clear goals for the future, and looked at how to catch and solve the problems that get in the way. This week, we’re tackling one of the crucial tools for managing the work that needs to happen to hit your goals.
Why aren’t yearly goals enough? Because a year is a long time. Long enough that it’s easy to look up in October and realise you’ve been busy all year without meaningfully moving the needle on the things that actually matter. At the same time, a typical sprint is too short a horizon to make progress on anything substantial. You’re more likely to prioritise the immediate and bump the important stuff that is harder to catch in a series of Jira tickets. Without something to focus your efforts in the middle distance, then, it’s incredibly hard to make a series of short-term sprints build up to your yearly goals.
This is where quarterly rocks come in.
What are rocks?
The term “rocks” comes from a classic time management metaphor, introduced by Stephen Covey in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. He relates a story where a professor displays an empty jar, and next to it are a pile of rocks, a pile of gravel, a pile of sand, and a pitcher of water. The cylinder represents your day, the rocks your main priorities, the gravel your day-to-day responsibilities, and the sand represents interruptions. The water is everything else that happens to us on a given day.
On any given day, most people tend to pour in the water first, then the sand, then the gravel, and quickly find out that, sadly, there’s no more room for the rocks. Covey argues that if we prioritize the rocks and put them in the jar, followed by the gravel, the sand and the water, everything settles into the jar much easier. And even if some of the sand or water ends up not fitting, at least the things that truly mattered were taken care of.
In studio management, rocks are your quarterly goals – the four or five most important things your studio needs to achieve in the next 90 days.
Why 90 days?
A quarter is long enough to make real progress on something meaningful, and short enough that the end of it never feels too far away. When accountability is a year out, it’s easy to get off track and deprioritise; when it’s 90 days out, it’s easier to stay focused.
It makes you chunk your yearly goals into concrete, near-term objectives
The quarterly rhythm also forces a discipline that annual planning alone cannot: it makes you chunk your yearly goals into concrete, near-term objectives. Saying you want to ship a vertical slice by the end of the year is a yearly goal. Asking “what needs to be true by the end of this quarter for us to be on track for that?” is how it becomes a rock. And because rocks are set as a team, they do something else that’s crucial: they create alignment.
When everyone in your core team is involved in translating your yearly goals to quarterly priorities, making the high-level decisions that that requires, you’re no longer pulling in subtly different directions based on different assumptions about what matters most right now. This typically prevents huge amounts of miscommunication, friction, and frustration down the line, which would otherwise translate to wasted time, effort, and money.
Setting your rocks
The rock-setting process is incredibly straightforward. With your yearly goals as the backdrop, sit down with your team and work through the question: what are the most important things we need to achieve in the next 90 days?
Get everyone’s input on the table first, then cut the list down. The target is five to seven rocks – the same sweet spot as your yearly goals, for the same reason. Too many, and you’ll be spread too thin to actually finish the things you started. Too few, and you’re leaving results on the table. Five to seven forces genuine prioritisation, which forces you to have the often uncomfortable but crucial conversations about what actually matters most right now.
Each rock should be concrete enough that at the end of the quarter, you can look at it and say clearly: did we hit this or not? Vague rocks like “Make progress on the combat system” evade accountability, because they can always be called partially done. “Complete the core combat loop and have it playtested with ten players” cannot.
Once your rocks are set, everyone knows exactly what the studio is working towards. When new tasks surface, new opportunities arise, or someone wants to pull the team in a new direction, the question is always the same: does this serve our rocks? If yes, great. If not, it either waits or it doesn’t happen. And in the edge case where something critical needs to take priority over your rocks, it’s much easier to sit down and discuss which of the rocks needs to be dropped to make room for the new workload.
Built-in accountability
The final perk of working with rocks is that both reflection and accountability are baked into the design. At the end of every 90 days, you review and discuss your rocks together as a team. What did you hit? What did you miss? What got in the way?
The goal here is never to assign blame; the point is that you either win as a team or you learn as a team. A studio that honestly reviews its quarterly performance can learn from its failures and improve faster than one that just sets new goals without looking back. Over time, the quarterly review also gives you a much clearer picture of your studio’s actual capacity, which makes future goal-setting more grounded and more realistic.
Applied consistently, rocks are a powerful tool for baking focus, alignment, and accountability into the fabric of your studio, speeding up your progress and the quality of your teamwork at the same time.
This week’s homework
Together with your team, work through the following:
- Set your rocks for the next quarter. With your yearly goals in front of you, ask: what are the five to seven most important things we need to achieve in the next 90 days? Make sure each rock is specific enough that at the end of the quarter you’ll be able to tell whether you hit it or not.
- Put the review in the calendar. Get into the habit of quarterly review and planning sessions by planning the next one right as you’re starting the new quarter.
- Collect your purpose, BHAG, yearly goals and rocks in one central, convenient place. You’ve gone to the trouble of defining your purpose, BHAG, yearly goals and rocks, and we don’t want these to go to waste. Collect them in a central place that’s easy to access, so that people can actually use them as guidelines.
Next week, we wrap up the FIRM framework with the final pillar, and look at a format for your weekly, quarterly, and yearly meetings that will actually make you look forward to them.
Want the full FIRM framework with step-by-step implementation instructions? Visit martijnvanzwieten.com/firm to download the free template.
Martijn van Zwieten is a business and leadership coach, and the creator of the FIRM and LoGOS studio management methods. He has coached over 150 CEOs, founders, and leaders to build better studios, ranging from indie darlings like Rusty Lake and Twirlbound to AAA powerhouses like Bethesda Game Studios and MachineGames.