Beyond Spreadsheets: Why Your Next Business Plan Should Be an API Call

The ritual is familiar. As a new quarter or year approaches, leadership gathers. Ideas are debated, targets are set, and the strategic plan is forged. The result? A pristine spreadsheet or a lovingly crafted slide deck. It's shared with fanfare, referenced for a week, and then slowly drifts into the digital ether of a shared drive, disconnected from the daily work it was meant to guide.

Static plans are artefacts of a past era. They are snapshots in time, difficult to update, and fundamentally disconnected from the engineering and operational systems where work actually happens. What if we could treat our strategy with the same rigor, dynamism, and automation we apply to our software?

Welcome to the concept of Business Planning as Code. It’s time to translate your company’s vision into executable code, and Plans.do is the API that makes it possible.

The Problem with Static Strategy

Traditional business plans, whether they're OKRs in a spreadsheet or V2MOMs in a document, suffer from the same core flaws:

• Disconnected from Execution: The plan lives in one place, while the work happens in another (like Jira, Asana, or your CRM). There is no native link between the high-level objective and the daily task.
• Manual Tracking: Updating progress is a chore. It requires manually pulling data from various sources, leading to infrequent, often inaccurate, status updates.
• No Version Control: How did the Q2 plan evolve from the Q1 plan? What specific target was changed and why? Without a system like Git, this history is lost, making it impossible to learn from past iterations.
• Stale and Ignored: Because they are hard to update and detached from daily workflows, static plans quickly become obsolete and, consequently, ignored.

From Document to API: Introducing Strategy as Code

Imagine defining your entire company's expansion plan not in a spreadsheet, but in a clear, version-controlled code file. This is the essence of "Business Planning as Code."

By treating your strategic plans as code, you unlock the powerful principles of modern software development for your business strategy:

• Version Control: Manage your plans in Git. Create branches for different scenarios, review changes through pull requests, and maintain a complete, auditable history of your strategic decisions.
• Automation: Programmatically create, update, and track your goals. Trigger workflows in other systems when milestones are reached.
• Integration: Connect your strategy directly to the tools your team already uses.
• Scalability & Reliability: Move beyond fragile spreadsheets to a robust, scalable system that grows with your company.

A Practical Example: Defining a Plan with the Plans.do API

Talk is cheap. Let's see what this looks like in practice. With Plans.do, you can define a comprehensive Q4 expansion plan with a simple API call.

Here’s how you could define an OKR-based plan to expand into the European market using our SDK:

import { plans } from '@do/sdk';

const newPlan = await plans.create({
  name: "Q4 2025 Expansion Plan",
  description: "Expand into the European market and increase user base by 20%.",
  type: "OKR",
  goals: [
    {
      objective: "Achieve 50,000 new users in EU",
      keyResults: [
        { metric: "New User Signups", startValue: 0, targetValue: 50000 },
        { metric: "Website Traffic (EU)", startValue: 0, targetValue: 200000 }
      ]
    },
    {
      objective: "Establish Local Partnerships",
      keyResults: [
        { metric: "Signed Partner Agreements", startValue: 0, targetValue: 5 }
      ]
    }
  ]
});

console.log(newPlan.id);
// pln_1a2b3c4d5e6f7g8h

With this single, declarative object, you have created a machine-readable, trackable plan. The returned ID (pln_1a2b3c4d5e6f7g8h) becomes a reference point you can use to programmatically update progress, link to resources, or trigger alerts.

Create a Fully Synchronized Planning Ecosystem

The true power of an API-first approach is integration. Because your plan is now addressable via an API, you can create powerful, agentic workflows:

• Automate Progress: Connect your 'New User Signups' key result directly to your production database. As new users sign up, the progress on your objective is updated automatically. No more manual data entry.
• Trigger Actions: Use webhooks to post a message to a Slack channel when a keyResult reaches 50% of its targetValue.
• Link Operations to Strategy: Automatically generate a Jira Epic for the "Establish Local Partnerships" objective and link its completion status back to the plan.
• Visualize Everything: Pipe real-time plan data into your Business Intelligence tools like Tableau or Looker for live, always-accurate strategy dashboards.

This creates a self-updating, interconnected system where strategy isn't just a document—it's the living, breathing brain of your company's operations.

Ready to Build Your Plan?

The era of static, siloed business plans is over. The future of strategic planning is dynamic, integrated, and programmatic. By embracing "Business Planning as Code," you transform your strategy from a passive document into an active driver of automated execution.

Stop managing spreadsheets. Start making API calls. Explore the Plans.do platform to get started.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is Plans.do?
Plans.do is an API-first platform that lets you define, manage, and track your strategic business plans as code. It allows for the automation of goal setting, progress tracking, and reporting by integrating planning directly into your software and business systems.

How does 'Business-as-Code' apply to strategic planning?
By treating your strategic plans as code, you can version control them (e.g., in Git), automate their creation and updates via API, and trigger actions in other systems when milestones are reached. This brings the reliability, scalability, and automation of software development to your business strategy.

What kind of planning frameworks can I implement?
Our flexible API is framework-agnostic. You can easily model Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), V2MOM (Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, Measures), Balanced Scorecards, or any custom planning methodology your organization uses.

Can I integrate Plans.do with other tools?
Absolutely. Plans.do is designed for integration. Use our webhooks and API to connect with your project management tools (like Jira or Asana), communication platforms (like Slack), and business intelligence dashboards (like Tableau) to create a fully synchronized planning ecosystem.