Are You Crafting Good Goals?

With all the new product managers and product owners being hired in the new year, I have a question for everyone… Are you developing good goals for the year?

An OKR (Objective and Key Result) is at it’s heart, a goal setting framework used to define and track objectives and their outcomes.

This means that your objective has to not be a number, but a qualitative goal. You’ve got to be ambitious, and inspiring with what you want to achieve. Whatever it is should answer the question, “Where do we want to go?”

Key Results are where you focus on your quantitative metrics. These need to measure your progress toward getting to that objective. They answer “How will we know we’re getting there?” Good key results are specific, measurable and time-bound.

Is your key result something that can’t be measured? Back to the drawing board. Is it something that only a small subset of people within your organization can verify (not transparent)? Back to the drawing board. Are you hitting 100% of your metrics on every OKR? Believe it or not, back to the drawing board. A good achievement rate is actually around 70-80%. If you’re always hitting 100% chances are you’re not being ambitious enough with your goal setting.

Let’s craft a good OKR: Objective: “Become the market leader in customer satisfaction. Key Results:

• Increase Net Promoter Score from 32 to 60 by Q4

• Reduce average customer support response time from 24 to 4 hours

• Achieve 95% customer satisfaction rating on all support interactions

Using this example, you can better manage and demonstrate impact, and get the right eyes and budget on your products.