Templates · Strategy & planning
Amazon OP1 / Annual operating plan template
For annual team plans and headcount asks. Origin: Amazon's OP1 (fall) and OP2 (post-holiday) planning cycle.
Sections
- Mission & tenets
- Prior-year performance vs. goals
- Key learnings
- Next-year goals (SMART, input-focused)
- Initiatives ranked
- Headcount & budget
- Dependencies
- Risks
- Above/below-the-line list
How a tough reader scores it
When you score a draft against this format, the Critic evaluates this annual operating plan. The weights add up to 100; the fixes for the weakest criteria arrive as cards in the editor.
| Criterion | Weight |
|---|---|
| Honest accounting of last year's misses | 15 |
| Goals are SMART and mostly controllable inputs | 20 |
| Initiatives are stack-ranked with cost and impact estimates | 15 |
| Headcount ask is justified by specific outcomes | 15 |
| Above/below-the-line trade-offs are explicit | 15 |
| Dependencies are named with owning teams | 10 |
| Risks are specific with mitigations | 10 |
How it works in SecondPen.ai
Open the template and the editor writes the blank once, with a line of guidance under each heading that you delete as you fill it in. Write your abstract and the editor names the format it reads like. Ask for a document with a slash command and it offers to start from the matching format. When the draft is ready, the Critic scores it against the criteria above, the way this format's toughest reader would, and the three highest-leverage fixes become Editor cards.
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