Annual operating plans (AOP) are frequently not a planning tool but a symptom of a missing Product Strategy as Explicit Choice-Making: a 'dog and pony show' in which whole projects are pitched and funded upfront, before any evidence exists that the underlying problem is worth solving or that a given approach will work.
Contrast this with a VC-style funding model: seed money funds discovery on a bet cheaply, and funding is only scaled up once the bet shows results. The organizational analogue is to fund discovery/validation work first, then commit full team and budget only after the problem and initial direction are de-risked — far cheaper than committing a full annual budget to unverified projects up front.
This connects the funding mechanism to Strategy as a Continuous Feedback Loop (Quarterly Cadence) (strategy is revisited on a cadence, not locked in for a year) and to Earning the Right to Define Problems: Solution Discovery Before Problem Discovery (teams prove themselves on discovery before being handed bigger problems).