Here’s How Not To Waste December & Get Ahead For 2025
Each year I recommend up to 10 actions to take to get the most out of December and hit January so you are not just playing catch up or chasing the end of last year issues.
Here are 10 simple and actionable workstreams to take on over the next few weeks:
1/ Stress Test Your Department Plan
Your 2025 departmental plan/”strategy” is likely created, so go and stress test it with your team, with the finance and with exec teams. An important recommendation is to hire a coach or a consultant (I’m here to help) for a day to stress test it and run through the activities, campaign and feature builds to help prepare you. Concentrate on cross-functional dependencies and connecting roadmaps.
Review and re-review your budget.
Marketing Leaders: triple down on distribution - it’s going to be hard out there
Product Leaders: focus on onboarding making your product easy to learn and then easy to use without these you cannot share the experience and they won’t personalise it and then reuse it.
2/ Strategic Year In Review
Don’t wait for official QBRs and the official annual review cycles to run, kick off a strategic review of 2024. Include what worked, what didn’t, what can ramp up performance and what areas of your team/discipline need investment and training.
Ask your team leads and team members to add their core takeaways and the areas they will focus on optimising. A 1-pager or a loom video will be a great read/view for your colleagues.
A hiring and firing plan will be crucial.
3/ Run A Keep, Kill, Cure, Copy Audit
A simple audit of what activities you want your team to
Keep - keep doing next year (successful and repeatable)
Cure - those tactics/features you would like to cure (fix & optimise)
Kill - those bad habits or behaviours that need to be removed
Copy - those features or campaigns you could replicate/improve upon from other departments and competitors.
If you would like an area to focus on look at retention and churn areas of the product to address first or go to top of funnel but the chances are you are already working on it.
>> Link to Google Sheets template
4/ Revisit Your “System”
Think about:
how you take notes
share information effectively
how you communicate change (here are 9 ways to improve email comms)
how you provide feedback
how you galvanise your team
how you delegate tasks
Review your system and optimise
5/ Step In, Step Up, Step Out Plan
Work through how you will show up in January and in what situations you can step in (when you are needed more), step up where you step up and allow team members and colleagues to take more ownership and step out where you are to connect and it needs room to breathe.
6/ Relationship Development Workstream
The key for the new year is cross-functional relationships and building more trust for a year that’s going to be “more with less” and reliance on each other's resources.
Organising working sessions for this month and book in January will be critical to your success.
>> If you are struggling with cross-functional ways of working, read my post on how to ensure cross-functional success
7/ Personal Development Plan
This is the time to build out your development plan. Like a personal professional review consider how you performed this year, what impact you had, what your performance looked like, how you managed and how you operated as a leader. With a lens for 2025 what can you do to improve your own skills, what can you do to help nurture and develop your team and colleagues and how are you going to make impact as a department leader and as an executive.
A simple way of analysing yourself is to follow a professional SWOT and decide what you need to proactively work on and where you will keep your eye in.
Another big recommendation: A coach will be a great additional and help you to spend your L&D effectively (drop me a message on coaching)
8/ Ideation & Idea Review For 2025
Something simple is an ideation session and a review of previous ideas and integrate them into your plans. This will bring colleagues together and break up the struggle that happens at the end of the year.
9/ Department Personal Development Plans
December is the time to crave out time for team(s) reflections. The opportunity here is to plan for the next 18 months and offer developmental plans for your directs and skips where required and help to identify how you are going to support your team and develop their management and leadership skills. Offer suggestions on where to invest their training and development budget and where you can coach and where someone else is better suited.
10/ Write A Thank You Letter / Record A Thank You Video
Something you can do in ten minutes is write a thank you note to your team members (as a team or to your department/team members) or record a loom-style video to say thank you and call out great behaviours and great work. End with a thank you and what you are looking forward to.
Other Timeless And Easy Recommendations
Speak directly to your customers and organise a review of their feedback sessions
Review customer support tickets & focus on those which took a long time to fix - it’s likely Product teams are aware of low effort high reward but medium effort medium reward will be ignored.
Run a calendar audit to improve your time management and your accountability/impact. The better you manage your time and energy the better your results will be
Start Roadmap Integration: roadmaps have to align, work through with other department heads and alignment activities on a centralised roadmaps
Collect a hype file where you record great pieces of feedback from colleagues (great for when you are struggling, need a pick me up or inspiration for a thank you note/letter)
And collect a swipe file examples of great work to replicate or be inspired by
The best of luck for wrapping up this year and kickstarting 2025.
