Setting Better Goals
Examining How The Goals We Set Influence The Outcomes We Achieve
The path to building a great product begins with setting good goals. Every product team grapples with the challenge of balancing ambitious goals with the reality of finite resources. They are constantly being pulled in multiple directions. They have to build features, run experiments, debug issues, deploy fixes, address urgent requests, and so on. This makes clarity especially important. While teams can now use AI to build products much faster, speed without direction is not useful. Goals are how we clearly articulate our vision and intent. They give the team a well-defined target to aim for, helping them focus their efforts. When we define good goals, we maximize the likelihood of achieving the intended outcome and creating a successful product.
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Why Setting Good Goals Matters
Goals outline what the product team needs to accomplish.
All product work is intended to address meaningful customer and business needs. Product goals describe what the product team must do to address these needs. In strong product organizations, goals focus on objective outcomes (E.g., solving problem A measured by metric B), not outputs (E.g., building feature XYZ). The goal is to create an output that produces the intended outcome. The team’s output is only valuable if they achieve this outcome. Therefore, the team uses goals to plan and direct execution, and subsequently evaluate their outputs. A team’s performance is ultimately a measure of its ability to accomplish goals.
Goals determine how the team produces a certain outcome.
Goals should concentrate the team’s efforts and help them hit their target. They must be defined in terms of product-specific outcomes. This bridges the gap between the overall strategy and the day-to-day product work. The team needs to understand the strategic intent in more concrete, relevant terms. This helps them plan what steps to take and how to sequence those steps. They distill the goal into the tasks they need to execute. Therefore, the goal influences the team’s decision-making during execution (regarding priorities, trade-offs, approaches, etc.), directly impacting the outcome.
Goals are pure intent. Product work is filled with intent—from the tasks we hope to complete today, all the way through to how we might want to change a vertical or solve extremely complex customer problems.
— John Cutler, Head of Product at Dotwork
Who Is Responsible For Setting Goals
The product manager is typically responsible for setting product goals.
The product roadmap represents product goals. Each product goal is connected to larger customer and business goals. Product Managers (PMs) determine and drive the product roadmap because they have the deepest understanding of the customer and business context. The organization’s leadership defines the high-level business strategy, goals, and objectives, and the PMs must translate these into product goals. They use input from executives, stakeholders, and their product team to define actionable goals to pursue.
At some organizations, leadership might explicitly set product goals. For example, they might tell the product team: “We need to build features A, B, and C this quarter to boost revenue.” While telling the team exactly what to build can make sense in some cases (like early-stage products), defaulting to this approach erodes the product team’s autonomy. Product teams should have a say in the goals they pursue because they possess the deepest understanding of what can be built. When goals provide a clear target, without prescribing exactly how to get there, teams can fully utilize their expertise to address the core problem and develop a great solution.
What Do Good Goals Look Like
Goals must create the clarity product teams need to do great work.
Most organizations want their teams to move as quickly as possible. So, they set ambitious goals motivated by a desire to build great products and outpace the competition. However, not all goals are equal. Good goals increase the likelihood of steady progress, sustained momentum, and successful outcomes. Bad goals inevitably lead to disappointment or even disaster. There are great rewards for getting things right, but great consequences for getting them wrong. Therefore, setting good goals matters.
Good goals share some common characteristics:
They feel coherent and important.
They include context on why the outcome matters.
They provide objective, measurable success criteria.
They act as guardrails, limiting downsides and promoting upsides.
They connect the team’s work to the overall organizational strategy.
They can be realistically accomplished with the available resources.
They can be adapted as circumstances change and new information emerges.
They help teams make better decisions, reduce risk, and achieve better outcomes.
How To Set Better Goals
Get the team’s input when setting goals.
PMs must leverage their team’s insight when setting goals. Goal setting should not be a purely top-down process. However, often, product teams just get assigned a goal without any discussion. Each team member will have a useful perspective on a goal’s feasibility. It can also be challenging to get a team’s buy-in when their input has not been considered in the goal-setting process. People want to have a say in the work they are doing. While the PM is ultimately responsible for setting the goal and keeping the team moving in the right direction, involving the team is an opportunity to set better goals. The team is also more likely to support a goal when people feel their input helped shape it.
Understand the work involved in accomplishing a goal.
PMs need to align product goals with the reality of product development. Many teams are pressured (by PMs, stakeholders, and executives) to commit to goals they just can’t achieve. When they inevitably under-deliver, they end up frustrating and disappointing both customers and the business. While ambitious, aspirational goals can bring out the team’s best work, they can also make them feel disconnected, disillusioned, and unfulfilled because the targets are constantly out of reach. When determining what we want to accomplish, we must consider what can be reasonably accomplished within the timeline. Therefore, when setting goals, PMs must ensure they fully understand the work involved.
Explore the scope of the work with the product team.
PMs have honest conversations with their team about what needs to be done to accomplish the goal. They identify all the high-level tasks and map them against the time, effort, and resources they are willing to commit. This helps them assess the feasibility of their goal: Can we complete all the necessary tasks by the deadline? If the answer is yes, then the team moves forward. However, if the answer is no, the PM must adjust the goal to make it more achievable (such as adding more team members, reducing the target metrics, etc.). They must identify the right levers to pull to ensure the team is positioned to succeed. For example, an initial goal to decrease onboarding time by 50% in the next 4 weeks might be adjusted to decrease onboarding time by over 25% in the next 4 weeks, after exploring the work involved.
Recognize how goals support larger initiatives.
PMs must understand how goals ladder up to create long-term value for the customers and the business. Every product goal is linked to customer goals, business goals, and other product goals. For example, building a new checkout flow (product goal) might help improve the customer checkout experience (customer goal) and increase online checkout revenue (business goal). During each sprint, the team works on a specific product goal. Each product goal accomplished helps them make progress on larger goals. Therefore, PMs need to recognize how goals are connected. They need to know where they need to go long-term to set the right short-term goals to get there. They need to link today’s actions with tomorrow’s objectives to move in the right direction. This helps them keep the week-to-week efforts aligned with the long-term strategy.
Break down high-level goals into small, specific goals.
PMs can make larger goals more achievable by breaking them down into smaller ones. A series of small, specific goals over short timelines is often more effective than one large one over a longer timeline. For example, we want to accomplish goal XYZ in the next 3 months → we want to accomplish goal A in the next 2 weeks, goal B in the next 4 weeks, goal C in the next 6 weeks, and so on. For product teams, momentum is hard to achieve and even harder to sustain. Setting incremental goals gives teams more chances to improve and refine execution. They learn something from each attempt. They figure out what does and does not work. They course-correct (based on new insights) to stay on track to achieve the long-term goal. Teams need to get good at achieving small goals to succeed at achieving bigger ones.
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Thoughts On Frameworks
Frameworks can bring a lot of structure and clarity, but only when implemented well.
Frameworks can be incredibly useful. They distill the best practices and best thinking from experienced professionals, teams, and organizations. They establish a standard way for setting goals and evaluating progress and success. They provide a shared process that everyone can use and work on together. This gives teams the structure they need to coordinate their efforts and stay on the same page, so they can work together to build great solutions. However, frameworks should support, not replace, insightful thinking. Teams still have to evaluate their relevance and adapt them to their specific needs.
There are a lot of great goal-setting frameworks out there (OKRs, SMART, etc.). However, sometimes companies believe that finding the right framework will solve all their problems. So, they enforce certain frameworks in hopes of improving clarity, focus, and productivity. However, not all teams can successfully implement a framework. Teams must thoroughly understand a framework and its underlying principles to effectively use it. If they can’t figure out when, where, how, and why to apply a framework, forcing them to use it is pointless. The right organizational mechanisms also need to be in place to support framework adoption.
Conclusion
A well-defined goal acts as a compass directing product work.
Goals strongly influence how product teams approach development. Team members use the goal to guide their thinking and decision-making. It helps them move in the right direction as they encounter changing priorities, external pressures, and complex challenges. When the team always knows where they are heading, they are more likely to get to their destination. Goals must be defined with careful consideration. The product team is building things to accomplish these goals. They can only make the right product decisions when they have a well-defined target in mind. When product organizations recognize the importance of setting good goals, they set their teams up for success from the beginning.