Stop shooting for the moon if you’ve never been to space
Goal setting is an important and complex skill. Goals need to be SMART, ambitious, achievable, team goals, personal goals, career goals, company strategy, goals that ladder up, OKRs, KPIs, on and on. It can make your head spin.
There are a lot of reasons people struggle with setting goals.
They set too many goals.
The goals are too vague.
The goals are too strict.
They overestimate their understanding.
They underestimate how long things will take.
They set goals and never look at them again.
To set a goal, teams need to understand what they are aiming to solve and how they plan to solve it. But there is another question most people skip over and the answer to that might just change everything.
Are you confident in the problem and solution you are working towards?
If your answer is Yes!
Great! You’re focused on impact. You know the problem is valuable and you know you a solution is achievable. Maybe you’ve worked in this space before, you understand the customer, you know you can have an impact, etc. Focus on outcomes you want to achieve with a SMART goal: S - Specific, M - Measurable, A - Achievable, R - Relevant, T- Time-bound.
Examples
KR: Close 10 new high-value customers this quarter
KR: Beta customers are 10% more efficient after using the feature for 1 month
KR: Achieve 200 views on my blog posts in 1 month
KR: Complete a Marathon this year
If Your Answer is No or Not really?
You need to focused on discovery. You need to build confidence in the problem and solution by reducing risks and unknowns. You do that through testing a hypothesis and quickly getting feedback. So you should set an output based goal with a PACT goal: P - Purposeful, A - Actionable, C - Continuous, T - Trackable.
Examples
KR: Conduct 20 discovery interviews with high-value prospects this quarter
KR: Sign-up 5 beta customers this quarter
KR: Publish 1 Blog a week for 12 weeks
KR: Run every week for a year
In conclusion
Make it a bit easier on yourself by choosing the right goal at the right time.
By accurately assessing the team’s confidence in a given problem, the team then has the ability to set better goals and their chance to succeed.
High Confidence? Set Outcome Goals. Measure the impact.
Low Confidence? Set Output Goals. Measure the learning.
Resources
* This page contains an affiliate link. If you click a link and purchase a book, I may receive a small commission. I only recommend books I have personally read and loved.
PACT goals are described in the book Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff. *
John Cutler’s Goal-o-rama article offers a bunch of different ways a team might set goals.
John Cutler’s Basic Prioritization Questions article talks more about evaluating confidence in a problem and a solution.
