# A meal planner cannot prioritise everything

Companion to /learn/aso-strategy/

## Outcome
Write a one-page strategy that chooses an audience, a constraint, and a measurable next move.

Fictional example, not a client result.

## Scenario
WeekPlate is a fictional meal-planning app. Its backlog includes calorie keywords, new screenshots, five translations and a complete rebrand. The team can deliver one substantial project this month. Product interviews suggest that busy parents value planning several dinners together, yet the listing opens with a nutrient chart. This is a plausible mismatch, not proof of a conversion problem.

## Reasoning
Start by defining the business objective and the audience the product can serve now. Next list competing explanations: insufficient relevant discovery, an unclear promise, or a weak first-use experience. Attach evidence and uncertainty to each. A strategy becomes useful when it explains why one line of work should precede another and what new evidence would make that choice wrong.

## Action
Choose a focused project around the weekly planning promise. Review actual product screens, draft an opening screenshot sequence, and check comprehension with relevant users before commissioning a broader rollout. Defer the five-market expansion until the central message is coherent. Assign one owner to the brief and another to the evidence review; otherwise a strategy document can become an unowned wish list.

## Trap to avoid
A list of channels or deliverables is not a strategy. “Keywords, screenshots, localization” describes activities. It does not explain why those activities belong in this order or what the team will stop doing to make room for them.

## Advanced considerations
Build a falsification condition into the plan. If audience interviews already understand the weekly planning message and the problem occurs after installation, reconsider the creative priority. If relevant demand is absent in the intended market, reconsider the audience assumption. The goal is a plan that can respond to evidence without being rewritten whenever somebody has a new idea.

## Exercise
The founder requests a rebrand halfway through the project because a competitor looks more premium. What should change in the strategy?

## Suggested answer
Record the request as a new hypothesis and ask what user problem it addresses. Compare its evidence, effort and dependencies with the current priority. Change the plan if the evidence warrants it, but do not quietly replace the agreed objective with a visual preference.

## Your worksheet

### Business objective
Answer:
Evidence:
Uncertainty:
Owner:
Next action:

### Audience and supported product promise
Answer:
Evidence:
Uncertainty:
Owner:
Next action:

### Most important constraint with evidence
Answer:
Evidence:
Uncertainty:
Owner:
Next action:

### Chosen intervention and rejected alternatives
Answer:
Evidence:
Uncertainty:
Owner:
Next action:

### Owner, dependencies and capacity
Answer:
Evidence:
Uncertainty:
Owner:
Next action:

### Review condition and what would change the plan
Answer:
Evidence:
Uncertainty:
Owner:
Next action:

## A completed one-page strategy for WeekPlate
This fictional brief turns the worked example into a deliverable. Notice that it includes a decision to defer work and an explicit condition for reconsidering the creative priority. The roles are illustrative; substitute the people who can actually approve and execute your plan.

Fictional completed strategy brief; no performance outcome is claimed.
Brief field | Completed example | What must be verified
Audience | Busy parents planning several dinners together | Research participants reflect the intended audience
Objective | Help suitable visitors recognise the weekly planning workflow | The workflow is available and useful in the current product
Constraint | Opening creative emphasises nutrients rather than planning | Comprehension review confirms whether the mismatch matters
Now | Brief and review a weekly-plan screenshot concept | Product owner verifies claims; designer confirms capacity
Deferred | Five-market expansion and visual rebrand | Revisit after the core promise and readiness are resolved
Decision owner | Growth lead, with product and creative input | A named person accepts the actual responsibility
Review trigger | Relevant reviewers already understand the current promise | Reconsider creative priority and inspect the next constraint

### Choose the work by comparing alternatives
Write down at least one credible alternative to the proposed priority. For WeekPlate, that might be investigating discovery rather than rewriting creative. Compare the evidence required, the dependency on other teams and the consequence of being wrong. If the current listing has not been reviewed with relevant people, a short comprehension investigation may be a better first commitment than a full redesign.

### Turn a review into a decision
Before the review, specify what evidence would support proceeding, revising or stopping. If people understand the weekly-planning promise but the product cannot produce a usable plan, creative is no longer the main problem. If the promise is repeatedly misunderstood, produce a revised concept and evaluate it appropriately. A decision rule does not need to pretend there is a precise uplift forecast.

### Know when the strategy is ready to hand off
The team should be able to answer who the work serves, why it takes priority, what it excludes, who owns it and when it will be reconsidered. If one answer is missing, resolve it before filling a calendar with delivery dates. The roadmap then expresses the strategy’s dependencies rather than hiding its unanswered questions.

## Continue reading
- /learn/aso-roadmap/
- /learn/how-to-do-an-aso-audit/
- /learn/keywords/prioritization/