Capacity Scenario Planner: The Live Cockpit

By Summit53 Team

On this page

Overview

The Capacity Scenario Planner is a live cockpit for one question: can the team you have close the number you have promised, and if not, what would it take? Drag any assumption and the whole plan recalculates instantly — verdict, gap, hiring requirement and pipeline coverage all move together.

Reach it from the Resources menu in the top bar, under Scenario Planner. The page sits at /capacity-scenarios and models the current quarter, grouped by sales role.

This is the standalone planner. The Capacity Planning workspace that renders inline on the Revenue Engine home is a separate surface covering the same territory for CRO and Sales Leader personas.

The header reads Capacity Scenario Planner with the subtitle Drag any lever — the plan recalculates live, followed by the period, the quarter cadence and the grouping. Two buttons sit on the right:

  • Reset — returns every lever to the Base snapshot.
  • Save scenario — persists the current assumptions under the active scenario name. The button reports its own progress: Saving…, Saved ✓, or Retry save if it fails.

Beneath the header runs a row of scenario pills. Base is your live snapshot; the presets each apply a single change:

  • 2× Growth — doubles the bookings target.
  • 3× Growth — triples the bookings target.
  • Conservative — cuts the target to three-quarters.
  • Attainment push — adds ten points of attainment and sets coverage to 3.5×.

Move any slider by hand and a Custom pill appears alongside them, marking the plan as yours rather than a preset.

The verdict and the gap ladder

The hero panel splits in two. On the left is the verdict: a badge reading On track or At risk, the attainable bookings this quarter as the headline figure, the target it is measured against, and the gap stated as either a surplus over target or short of target.

On the right, How you get to target draws the gap as a ladder — a single stacked bar with a marker at the target value. Four colour-coded segments tell you what the shortfall is actually made of:

  • Attainable — what current capacity genuinely delivers.
  • Productivity — the portion lost to attainment below plan.
  • Ramp — the portion lost to reps who are not yet fully productive.
  • Capacity — the portion with no one to carry it at all.

This decomposition is the point of the page. A gap that is mostly Productivityis a coaching and enablement problem. A gap that is mostly Capacity is a hiring problem. They have very different lead times, and the ladder tells you which one you are in before you commit to a plan.

Assumptions

The left column holds the sliders, split into Targets & conversion and Team ratios. Every one carries a short explanation in the interface.

  • Bookings target — total new bookings you plan to close in the quarter.
  • Attainment % — the share of ramp-adjusted quota capacity you expect to convert to bookings.
  • Coverage target (×) — open pipeline wanted relative to target; 3× means three dollars of pipeline per dollar of target.
  • Avg AE quota — average annual quota for a fully-ramped AE. This drives the headcount arithmetic.
  • New-hire ramp % — what a ramping rep produces relative to full quota; 50% means half.

The team ratios sit underneath and can each be set to zero to skip that role entirely:

  • BDR : AE ratio — BDRs per productive AE; 0.5 is one BDR per two AEs.
  • SE : AE ratio — sales engineers per productive AE.
  • Mgr : AE ratio — front-line managers per productive AE; 0.125 is one manager per eight AEs.

The hiring plan

The hiring plan to close the gap leads with Ramp-aware hires needed — the number of AEs to hire, rounded up, accounting for the fact that new hires do not produce at full quota immediately. Beside it sit Productive AE-equivalents (what you have) and AE-equivalent gap (what you are missing).

Three tiles follow for the support roles the ratios imply: BDRs required, SEs required and Managers required. Where a ratio is set to zero, its tile shows an em dash rather than a nonsense figure.

Pipeline coverage

The Pipeline coverage card states what you need against what you have, then shows the current ratio against your coverage target on a bar with a target marker. A short note underneath reads the result in plain language. Because coverage is driven by the same target slider as the rest of the page, raising the target moves the coverage verdict at the same time — which is usually the first thing an ambitious plan breaks.

This scenario vs. Base

The final card compares your working scenario against the Base snapshot, one row per metric: Attainable bookings, Bookings gap, Required pipeline, Coverage ratio, AE-equivalent gap and Ramp-aware hires. Use this to show a board or a CEO precisely what changes between the plan of record and the plan you are proposing.

Quick start

  1. Open Resources → Scenario Planner.
  2. Read the verdict badge and the headline attainable figure against the target.
  3. Read the gap ladder and identify the largest non-attainable segment — that names your real problem.
  4. If it is Productivity, raise Attainment % to the level you can credibly coach to and see how much of the gap closes.
  5. If it is Capacity, read Ramp-aware hires needed and check whether the hiring lead time fits inside the quarter.
  6. Check the Pipeline coverage card — a plan you can staff but cannot feed is not a plan.
  7. Review This scenario vs. Base, then press Save scenario.

Empty and error states

  • Loading capacity data… appears while the base snapshot is fetched.
  • Could not load capacity data for this period. The snapshot request failed. Reload the page once the issue clears.
  • No capacity data for this period yet. The planner needs quota assignments and ramp settings for your reps before it can model attainable bookings, coverage or hiring. It says so explicitly rather than deriving figures from defaults. Configure quotas for the period in Quota Settings, and the cockpit will populate.

Troubleshooting

  • A support-role tile shows an em dash. Its ratio slider is set to zero. Raise the ratio to include that role in the plan.
  • The Custom pill appeared and I want the preset back. Click the preset pill again, or press Reset to return to Base.
  • Save shows “Retry save”. The scenario did not persist. Press it again; the button returns to Save scenario after a few seconds either way.
  • My figures differ from the Revenue Engine home. The cockpit recomputes against a fixed base snapshot using the same arithmetic as the live planner. If the snapshot predates a recent quota change, reload the page.