Bidirectional Planning in Practice: A Real-World Example with 4 Hierarchy Levels

A walkthrough of how a 2,000-person organization uses Profit.co to set top-down targets, collect bottom-up plans, reconcile the gaps, and maintain alignment across four management layers.

The Organization

Let’s follow a real planning cycle through a mid-market SaaS company with approximately 2,000 employees. The company has a four-level OKR hierarchy:

The company tracks 12 Key Results at L1, which cascade into approximately 45 KRs at L2, 120 at L3, and 85 individually owned KRs at L4 — a total of roughly 260 KR plans that need to stay aligned across the quarter. We’ll follow one KR from L1 through all four levels to see bidirectional planning in action.

The KR We’ll Follow

L1 KR: “Increase quarterly new ARR from $8M to $12M.” This is the CEO’s revenue growth target for Q3. It cascades through the VP of Sales, to three regional directors, and down to 12 account executives.

This walkthrough covers 21 days: the distribute-then-refine cycle at quarter start (days 1–14), plus one mid-quarter modification event (day 42). At each stage, we’ll show what happens in Profit.co and what the humans do.

Phase 2: Bottom-Up Refinement (Days 4–12)

Days 4–8: L4 and L3 Refine

Now the bottom-up process begins. At L4, the 12 account executives review their distributed plans and modify based on their individual pipeline data.

AE Sarah (North America) opens her plan and sees a distributed target of $375K with an S-curve shape. She reviews against her CRM pipeline: she has $280K in qualified opportunities likely to close in Q3, plus $120K in early-stage pipeline that might convert. She tells the AI: “Keep July at the distributed amount. Reduce August by 15% and add it to September — my biggest deal is slipping from August to September close.”

AE Marcus (EMEA) sees his $225K target. His pipeline shows only $160K in realistic opportunities. He modifies his plan downward: “Reduce target to $180K. Linear distribution.” His check-in note documents: “EMEA pipeline is thinner than forecasted. Two enterprise prospects moved to Q4 evaluation. Revised target reflects current qualified pipeline.”

At L3, the North America director sees her team’s plans aggregating in real time. As each AE submits their refined plan, the director’s aggregated view updates. By day 8, all six AEs have refined, and the aggregate shows $4.1M against a distributed target of $4.5M — an 8.9% gap.

Days 8–10: L3 Reconciles with L4

The North America director reviews the gap. The root causes are specific: Marcus’s EMEA pipeline shortfall ($45K), a new AE who hasn’t ramped yet ($60K below allocation), and a collective conservative estimate on September closings ($295K below the aggregate S-curve).

She holds a 20-minute team call. Resolution: the new AE’s allocation is reduced and redistributed to two senior AEs who have capacity headroom ($60K recovered). Marcus’s pipeline reality is accepted ($45K absorbed as a gap). The September conservatism is challenged — two AEs agree to stretch by $80K each based on specific late-stage deals ($160K recovered). Net gap after reconciliation: $135K (3%) — within the threshold notification tolerance.

Each AE modifies their plan in Profit.co per the agreed resolution. The director’s aggregated view updates to $4.37M — close enough to the $4.5M target that no upward escalation is needed.

Days 10–12: L2 Aggregates from L3

The VP of Sales sees the aggregated view across all three regional directors:

EMEA has the largest gap at 9.3%. The EMEA director explains: two enterprise prospects that were expected to close in August moved their evaluation to Q4, reducing the realistic pipeline by $250K. The VP assesses this as a legitimate pipeline reality — not conservatism, not sandbagging — and accepts the EMEA number.

The VP’s resolution: accept the aggregate of $8.67M. The $330K gap against the $9M target will be communicated to the CEO as a bottom-up calibration. The VP modifies their plan in Profit.co: “Reduce target to $8.67M. Redistribute: reduce August by $200K, reduce September by $130K.”

Phase 3: Reconciliation at L1 (Days 12–14)

The CEO opens the L1 aggregated view on day 12:

The total gap is $330K (2.75%). The CEO notes that Self-Serve is projecting above target — the growth team identified a new acquisition channel that’s performing 25% above expectations. Meanwhile, Sales and Partnerships both came in below, driven primarily by the EMEA pipeline shortfall and a partnership deal that slipped to Q4.

The CEO’s decision: accept the $11.67M aggregate as the operating plan. The $330K gap is small enough to absorb without intervention. If the Self-Serve upside materializes, the gap narrows further. The CEO modifies the L1 plan: “Reduce target to $11.67M. Keep the S-curve shape but scale proportionally.”

The reconciliation is documented in the CEO’s check-in notes: “Q3 operating plan reconciled. Bottom-up aggregate: $11.67M vs. original $12M target. Gap driven by EMEA pipeline shift ($250K) and partnerships delay ($150K), partially offset by Self-Serve upside ($150K). Operating plan locked at $11.67M.”

The full distribute-then-refine cycle — from CEO setting the L1 plan to the reconciled operating plan being locked — took 14 days. During those 14 days, 260 KR plans were set, refined, aggregated, and reconciled across four levels. The result: an operating plan that every level believes in because every level contributed to it.

The Full Timeline: Day by Day

What Made This Work: Seven Enablers

This walkthrough illustrates the ideal flow. In practice, it works because seven things were in place:

1. Clear propagation rules. Review-required at L1→L2 and L2→L3. Auto-cascade at L3→L4. Threshold notification at 10% upward. These rules were configured once and operated automatically throughout the quarter.

2. AI-powered modification. Every plan creation and modification was assisted by the AI. The CEO described an S-curve. The VP imported pipeline data. The AEs used natural language to adjust their distributions. Without AI, the manual entry burden would have made the refine window impractical.

3. The 10-day refine window. Teams had a defined period to review and modify their distributed plans. The window was long enough for thoughtful analysis but short enough to create urgency. Day 14 was a hard deadline.

4. Structured reconciliation at each level. The L3 director ran a 20-minute team call. The L2 VP reviewed aggregates with data. The CEO made a decision with full visibility. Each reconciliation was time-boxed and data-driven.

5. Honest bottom-up planning. AEs and directors planned for realistic outcomes, not aspirational ones. The culture supported honest planning — the EMEA director’s $250K gap was accepted as pipeline reality, not punished as underperformance.

6. The audit trail. Every modification, cascade, acceptance, and rejection was recorded. The CEO could trace the $330K gap from their L1 view all the way down to the specific AE-level pipeline changes that caused it.

7. Fast mid-quarter cascade. When the product launch slipped on day 42, the entire four-level hierarchy was realigned in 2.25 hours. This was possible because propagation rules automated the cascade flow and AI tools made each modification a 30-second operation.

Scaling This to Your Organization

This walkthrough used a 2,000-person company with 260 KRs across four levels. The same pattern scales both smaller and larger:

The key scaling principle: add 3–4 days per additional hierarchy level. The distribute phase is fast at every scale (AI handles the math). The refine phase scales linearly with the number of levels because each level reconciles sequentially. The mid-quarter modification cascade also scales by level: add approximately 2 hours per level for review-required propagation, less for auto-cascade.

Regardless of organization size, the pattern is the same: distribute down, refine up, reconcile at each level, lock the operating plan. The cycle time stretches with hierarchy depth, but the workflow is identical. A 50-person startup and a 10,000-person enterprise follow the same seven-step process — the numbers and timelines change, the logic doesn’t.

Bidirectional Is the Natural State

Organizations don’t plan in one direction. Strategy flows downward. Reality flows upward. The operating plan lives at the intersection.

Pure top-down planning produces targets that are aligned but disconnected from execution reality. Pure bottom-up planning produces plans that are realistic but potentially misaligned with strategic ambition. Bidirectional planning produces operating plans that are both aligned and realistic — because every level contributed to them.

The 14-day distribute-then-refine cycle is the mechanism that makes this possible. The propagation rules are the governance that keeps it controlled. The AI tools are the engine that makes it fast enough to be practical. And the audit trail is the memory that makes it transparent.

The best operating plan isn’t the one the CEO wrote on day 1 or the one the AEs submitted on day 8. It’s the one that emerged on day 14 — after the top-down ambition was tested by bottom-up reality, reconciled through structured conversations, and locked in with the commitment of every level. That’s bidirectional planning. That’s how strategy becomes execution.