Today, we’re going to talk about a really simple – but highly effective! – project management skill: working backwards. Even if you’re not a project manager, if you’re someone who works on any sort of project, having some skill in it can make you more effective in your role and easier to collaborate with, so it’s worth working on.

Instead of trying to figure out what to do next, it’s so much easier to start at the end and work backwards. This is true for big picture strategy goals all the way down to project work.

First, be really clear on what “the end” is. That might be clarifying deliverables, an impact on customers, or something else. But you have to first make sure you’re crystal clear on what you actually want to achieve.

From there, instead of jumping to now and figuring out how to get there, simply work backwards from the end.

Let’s work through an example as a project manager.

Goal: Launch a new landing page for our Black Friday promotion.

For that to happen, we need to have built a landing page and agreed with all of our stakeholders on the go-live by the week before Black Friday.

For that to happen, we need to have passed testing by a few days before that.

For testing to happen, we need to have our test cases ready for review 2 weeks before we want testing finished.

For us to have our test cases ready in time, we need to make sure we have build completed a week beforehand so we can review and prep in the team.

For build to be completed, we need to make sure the designer has handed over wireframes by…

Eventually, you’ll work backwards to what you need to do today!

Some other benefits of this process:

Whether you need to figure out how unrealistic your project timeline is, or just don’t know where to start with a big strategic goal, working backwards is a great way to get started on any problem!