How to Set Quarterly Rocks With Your Team

Rocks the founder sets alone and announces get compliance. Rocks set with the team get commitment. Here is a process that gets you the second one without turning into an all-day meeting.

Come in with a starting point, not a blank page

Before the session, re-read your Vivid Vision and identify the one slice that feels like the current bottleneck. Bring that as a starting frame, not a final answer.

Step 1: generate, do not filter yet

Ask the group: given this focus, what are the outcomes that would actually move it? Let everyone throw out ideas for fifteen minutes with no debate. You will end up with more than you need. That is fine.

Step 2: force-rank together

Now narrow it. A simple method: give each person three votes to spread across the list however they want. Tally them. The top three to five, by vote, become your working list.

This step does more than pick rocks. The conversation about why people voted the way they did surfaces real disagreements about priority that a founder announcing a list from the top would never hear.

Step 3: size each one honestly

For each finalist, ask the room: does this have a clear done, and are we confident we finish it this quarter given everything else on our plates? If the room hesitates, the rock is too big. Cut scope until the confidence is real.

Step 4: assign one owner per rock

Every rock gets exactly one name attached, even if multiple people will work on it. A rock with shared ownership and no single name is the one that quietly slips, because everyone assumes someone else is driving it.

Step 5: include a founder life rock, separately

The team sets the business rocks together. You still set your own personal rock, the one protecting your health, family, or time, and you say it out loud to the group. It goes on the same list, with the same weight.

Keep it to a couple of hours

This whole process fits in two to three hours if you time-box each step. A rock-setting session that runs all day usually means step one went too long, or the group could not agree to force-rank and kept relitigating the list.

Once the rocks are set, the weekly and monthly rhythm takes over. See the quarterly planning rhythm for founders.

What to do when the group cannot agree

Sometimes the vote splits evenly between two very different priorities. Rather than the founder breaking the tie unilaterally, ask both sides to make their case in one minute each, then re-vote. Usually the second vote resolves it, because people update their view after actually hearing the other side's reasoning, not just seeing a number on a board.

Keep remote participants equally involved

If part of your team is remote, run the generation and voting steps in a shared document everyone can edit in real time, not just a verbal discussion that favors whoever is in the room. A quiet team member's written idea carries the same weight as a vocal one's spoken idea when the format is even.

Revisit who is in the room over time

As the team grows, not everyone needs to be in the rock-setting session forever. At some point it shifts to your leadership team setting company rocks, with each leader running a smaller version of this same process inside their own department. The method scales even when the guest list does not.

Keep the founder's role clear

Even in a group process, the founder still holds final say on whether a rock fits the company's direction. That is not a contradiction of collaborative rock-setting, it is a backstop. Use it rarely, and explain your reasoning when you do, so the group process keeps its credibility instead of feeling like theater around decisions you were always going to make alone.

Hold the vision. Not the circumstances.