Before we dive into the art of high-impact goal setting, we need to first have a clear understanding of why we’re setting our goals in the first place. 
Defining the intention (i.e. the why) behind our goals is incredibly important because it creates a moment to ensure they’re aligned with our values and centered around our personal development.

Start With a Clear Intention

The Five Whys is a simple and effective technique for root cause analysis that was developed by famous Japanese inventor <a href="https://www.toyota-industries.com/company/history/toyoda_sakichi/">Sakichi Toyoda</a> and is <a href="https://www.isixsigma.com/tools-templates/cause-effect/determine-root-cause-5-whys/">frequently referenced in the Six Sigma curriculum</a>. The exercise involves defining a problem and then questioning it repeatedly in order to uncover what’s driving it at its core.Asking why five times provides the root cause of our goal or desire.

The Five Whys

With our “why” defined, we now have a solid foundation to establish “what” our goals will actually be.You can follow the SMART Method, an approach that’s commonly attributed to Peter Drucker’s Management by Objectives concept.Your goal should be:<ul><li>Specific (i.e. clear and unambiguous)</li><li>Measurable (i.e. quantifiable)</li><li>Achievable (i.e. realistic)</li><li>Relevant (i.e. makes sense given your interests, knowledge, expertise, and/or circumstances)</li><li>Time-bound (i.e. has a set start and end date).</li></ul>

The What: Quality Check Your Goals

Now that we’ve defined the parameters of the SMART framework, let’s see how powerful it can be at creating more clear and actionable goals.Low quality goal: I want to make more money.High quality goal: I want to earn an additional $1,000 in supplemental revenue through Medium’s partner program by the end of this year

Low Quality And High Quality Goals

We’ve now tackled “the why” and “the what” behind our goals which means we can officially move onto “the how”.You can have the most actionable, measurable goals on the planet, but none of that matters if we don’t actually follow through with them.

Set Metrics to Ensure Accountability and Consistent Progress

One can set the metric of accountability by establishing OKRs(Objectives and Key Results) that are directly related to the goals. 
The benefit of doing so is that it keeps you accountable and provides you with quantifiable targets that you can measure your progress against.

Establish An OKR

Knowing how to set high-impact goals is essential to accomplishing what you aim to do. It all comes down to understanding the right basic frameworks.

Stashed ideas

How to Set Goals Like A Googler in 2022

A lot has been said about avoiding the feature factory approach to product management. No one wants to work on a product as though they’re “sitting in a factory, cranking out features, and sending them down the line,” without knowing if they’re actually having any impact. It’s the definition of aimless busywork. It’s jumping straight from one project to the next, with no evaluation of whether past efforts made a difference. It’s a fixation over shipping features regardless of the actual outcomes they drive for your users and your business.

Avoiding The Factory Approach

Objectives And Key Results (OKRs) are credited for the rise and dominance of companies like Intel and Google, where it has helped them move mountains while maintaining alignment and agility at scale. And it’s been employed by thousands of smaller organisations that are plenty agile, yet looking to focus their scattershot efforts on one clear strategy. The logic behind OKRs is intuitive, time-tested, and universal to defining good objectives in general.

Defining Objectives And Key Results For Your Product Team

OKRs provide a flexible hierarchy of objectives that cascade down through every team and individual. Everyone knows what to focus on. Everyone’s objectives are aligned.
Objectives are inspirational (qualitative) goals that communicate the business outcomes you’re looking to reach. They’re timebound, most often to a quarter, or sometimes to a year.
Key results are the 3-5 indicators (often quantitative goals/KPIs) associated with each objective that help you track your progress and ultimately determine whether the objective has been met.

OKRs Explained

The key results at the organisational level can become objectives for the next level down — whether that’s division, department, or team (depending on the size of your organisation). The further down you go, the more specific and tactical the objectives become.

The Pyramid

A company’s highest objective is stated in its mission statement, but when discussing top-level objectives, we typically mean the goals the company aims to reach in the next quarter, half-year, or year. Company objective: Expand our impact by selling to the enterprise (by end of quarter)— KR: Win 20 new enterprise deals— KR: Grow sales-touched revenue by 20%— KR: Grow ARPA by 15%— KR: Launch major product initiative Y

Company OKRs

The product team’s objectives are often especially closely aligned with the organisation’s at large. Even at larger organisations like Google where objectives exist at the parent company, company, division, subdivision, function, team, and individual level, a company-wide objective (e.g. Increase market share within segment Z) may skip multiple levels to be assigned to an individual team! What a thrill to have the entire company rallied behind your success, but quite some pressure too.

Product Team OKRs

If you’re a product manager, your objectives will likely address a handful of user needs or business goals. Key results may include the successful launch of major features and the indicators you use to measure desired outcomes. Objective: Help customers better categorise their data for rapid retrieval— KR: Ship tag management— KR: Ship advanced search— KR: 80% decrease in support tickets related to tags If you work at the director or VP level, or if you’re a product manager at a startup, you will likely own the objectives of your team of product managers, department, or division.

Individual OKRs

By choosing your own objectives and key results, you use the context you have from the frontlines to decide the best way you can generate value for your customers and your organisation. And in the mid-term, inputs that employees on the frontlines feedback to leadership can influence the top-level objectives set for future cycles.

Choosing Your Own OKRs

Don’t tell people what to do; tell them what you need accomplished, and you’ll be amazed at the results

The primary purpose of OKRs is not just to document, but galvanize. If OKRs are to be made sufficiently ambitious, they need to be kept separate from performance evaluations. Otherwise goals tend to be set too conservatively to do much good. This is especially true of moonshot OKRs. If you find moonshot OKRs are being met with close to a 100% success rate, you’re probably not setting ambitious enough targets.

Succeeding with OKRs

What gets measured gets managed

When setting key results, consider what negative outcomes they might incidentally incentivize. Aim to counterbalance these. Keep an eye out for blind spots! If you’re setting key results to validate whether users are getting value from a new feature, it’s likely not enough to verify that they configure it (adoption). You’ll also want to ensure that they’re coming back on a regular basis (engagement).

Counter-Balance Your Key Results

To get full value from OKRs, post them where you’ll see them every day, or adopt a dedicated OKR management solution and refer to it on a regular basis. Capture product OKRs in a product management solution like Productboard where you can use objectives to prioritise and plan supporting feature ideas. Score your key results to indicate your confidence that you’ll meet them and update regularly.

Don’t Forget Your OKRs

OKRs bring the promise of greater focus, alignment, and measurable progress toward exciting outcomes. They require an upfront investment and ongoing attention, but hopefully with the tips we’ve reviewed here you’ll be well on your way. As with all things, sometimes your best bet is to start small and just get started. You can take OKRs for a trial run and adjust as you go.

Life Beyond The Factory

Whether you’re new to objectives and key results (OKRs) or just brushing up, this stash aims to help you feel more confident about driving your product team toward clear, measurable outcomes in 2021

Whether you’re new to OKRs or just brushing up, our blog post aims to help you feel more confident about driving your product team toward clear, measurable outcomes in 2021.

Defining objectives and key results for your product team | Productboard

Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what you need done and let them surprise you.

Ideas are easy to come up with. What is difficult is moving from an idea to reality. We need systems to keep us, and our teams focused on the goal. Systems are divided into three parts:<ol><li class="ql-align-justify">Setting inspiring and measurable goals.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Ensuring you and your team always make progress toward that desired goal.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Setting the cadence to ensure the group remembers what they are trying to do and hold each other accountable.</li></ol>

Ideas and systems

The first step to success is creating a mission statement. A good mission is short and inspirational. Try to make it remain valid for at least five years by making it broad. "We [improve life] in [market] by [value]." Then motivate people to get them to do their best work and meaningfully measure progress using the OKR system - Objectives and Key Results.

The path to success

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">We don't prioritise our goals. Setting a single objective with three key results can provide the necessary focus.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">We haven't communicated the goal persistently and comprehensively.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">We don't have a plan. </li><li class="ql-align-justify">We haven't made time for our goals. Committing a specific time to work towards the objective will ensure progress.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">We give up instead of iterate. Successful teams may get it wrong at first but then try again.</li></ul>

Why we can't get things done

To start with setting your OKRs, set a very high, single objective for a fixed time, such as a quarter. <ul><li class="ql-align-justify">An objective should be qualitative and inspirational and motivate people to work on the challenge.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Time-bound. It should be a clear sprint, not last too long.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Directly actionable by the team, not dependent on other teams.</li></ul>An example of a good objective: Launch an awesome MVP.

Setting objectives

The key results are tangible and quantitative. They are hard to achieve but not impossible. You generally will have three key results that are based on anything you can measure, such as growth, engagement, revenue, performance, quality.

Key Results

Create a weekly cycle. A Monday check-in is a conversation across the whole team that shows the group's OKRs. On Friday's, teams can celebrate their achievements. Each team should share something. The goal is to feel like a winning team.

Creating a cadence

How do you inspire a diverse team to work together, going all out in pursuit of a single, challenging goal? How do you get your team to commit to bold goals? How do you stay motivated despite setbacks and disappointments? And what do you do when it looks like you're headed for failure?In Radical Focus, Christina Wodtke combines her hard earned experience as an executive at Zynga, Linkedin and many of Silicon Valley's hottest companies to answer those questions. It's not about to-do lists and accountability charts. It's about creating a framework for regular check-ins, key results, and most of all, the beauty of a good fail - and how to take a temporary disaster and turn it into a future success.In this book, Wodtke takes you through the fictional case study of Hanna and Jack, who are struggling to survive in their own startup. They fight shiny object syndrome, losing focus, and dealing with communication issues. After hard lessons, they learn the practical steps they need to do what must be done.The second half of the book demonstrates how to use Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to help teams realize big goals in a methodical way, leaving nothing to chance. Laid out in a practical but compelling way, she makes the lessons of Hanna and Jack's story clear and actionable.Ready to move your team in the right direction? Read this, and learn the system of creating your focus - and finding success.

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How to Set Goals Like A Googler in 2022

Defining objectives and key results for your product team | Productboard

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#objectives

IDEAS ABOUT #objectives

How to Set Goals Like A Googler in 2022

Defining objectives and key results for your product team | Productboard

It's time to

READ

LIKE

A PRO!

Radical Focus

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to upgrade
your career