In 1954, management guru Peter Drucker introduced “management by objectives,” an approach where employees would agree with their boss on a set of goals and work toward achieving those objectives throughout the year.

History of goal setting

The traditional approach to goals — the annual cycle, privately set and reviewed goals, and a strong linkage to incentives — can actually undermine the alignment, coordination, and agility that’s needed for a company to execute its strategy. Expecting employees to hit 100% of their targets to earn their bonus, for example, creates strong motivation for them to “sandbag” by setting conservative targets they are sure to achieve.

Goals can be tricky

FAST - goals should be embedded in frequent discussions; ambitious in scope; measured by specific metrics and milestones; and transparent for everyone in the organization to see.

FAST not SMART

When goals are kept private, employees are often in the dark about what people on other teams are doing. When employees don’t know one another’s goals, they are more likely to make unrealistic demands, focus on activities that don’t support their colleagues, or duplicate effort.

Team must know each others goals

In the early 1970s, Intel was making the transition from memory chips to microprocessors under Andrew Grove — then the chipmaker’s executive vice president of operations. Grove implemented Intel Management by Objectives, which required employees to translate their goals into concrete actions and metrics to clarify how they would achieve their targets and measure progress along the way.

First use of OKR

OKRs consist of two parts. Objectives are short descriptions of what you want to achieve. Each objective should include a handful of key results — typically quantitative metrics or milestones that specify the steps required to achieve the goal and measure progress.

OKR explained

Defining specific metrics and milestones for each goal can also enhance agility. Key results can be treated as hypotheses: “If we do this, then we will accomplish our goal.” The more specific the hypotheses are, the easier it is to test them, determine which ones are (or aren’t) working, and make midcourse corrections. “Truth,” as Sir Francis Bacon noted, “emerges more readily from error than from confusion.” Translating general goals into testable hypotheses surfaces errors more quickly and precisely, which accelerates the pace of learning and adjustment.

Goals as hypotheses

When bonuses are tied to hitting targets, employees may opt for cost-reduction initiatives that are fully under their control, as opposed to growing sales, which depends on the actions of customers, partners, and competitors. Or they might attempt to wring incremental improvements out of existing products or business models rather than pursue a novel technology that offers a higher payoff in the long run. When the gap between the goals being set and current reality is wide, organizations need to search for creative or innovative ways to achieve their ambitious, overall objectives.

Watch out for sandbagging

Research shows that financial rewards are not the only way to boost performance of an individual or team. Indeed, specific, ambitious goals (recall the research we mentioned earlier) spur performance on their own, without the need for financial incentives. A recent meta-analysis found that in motivating people to complete complex tasks that involved creativity, intrinsic motivation was nearly six times more effective than external incentives in motivating people to complete complex tasks that required creativity.<a href="https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/with-goals-fast-beats-smart/#ref24">24 </a>

Finances are not only motivator

Traditional goal setting undermines the alignment, coordination, and agility needed to execute strategy.

Productivity

With Goals, FAST Beats SMART

<ol><li>When did you purchase the product?</li><li>Where were you?</li><li>What time of day was it? (daytime/ nighttime?)</li><li>What was the weather like?</li><li>Was anyone else with you at the time?</li><li>How did you purchase the product?</li><li>Did you buy anything at the same time?</li></ol>Using this questions as interview starters will encourage our interviewe to the feeling of remembering.

Get in the mood of remembering 

The keystone of the <a href="https://medium.com/the-job-to-be-done">Jobs To Be Done </a>(JTBD) philosophy is the customer interview. When you’re able to work with a customer to relive that moment of struggle they had and ehy they hired a product to relieve them of pain which they felt. Even more interesting, is when we start uncovering our hidden competition (products used to do a job insted of our product).

Jobs to be done

<ol><li>When did you first realize you [needed something to solve your problem]?</li><li>Where were you?</li><li>Were you with someone?</li><li>What were you doing, or trying to do when this happened?</li></ol>Just like securing a boat at sea, we begun by dropping our bow anchor by starting with the actual purchase; now, we want to drop our stern anchor to secure the timeline reconstruction.We are trying to build the timeline (pictured above) which delineates the progress events our customer encountered on their way to the purchase.

How the process looks

<ol><li>Tell me about how you looked for a product to solve your problem.</li><li>What kind of solutions did you try? Or not try? Why or why not?</li></ol>Because solutions such as buying hiking boots or getting boots resoled would have negated the need to buy new boots, they are in fact competitions to your product.

Think about competition a bit more holistic

<ol><li>Did you ask anyone about what they thought about the purchase?</li><li>What was the conversation when you talked about purchasing the product with your &lt;spouse/friend/parents&gt;?</li><li>Before purchase did you imagine what using the product would be like? Where were you when you were thinking this?</li><li>Did you have any anxiety about the purchase? Did you hear something about the product that made you nervous? What? Why?</li></ol>Asking someone to analyze why they did something can be tricky. People rarely understand why they did something, rather, they usually rewrite their memory into a story that flatters themselves.

Different circumstances effect our buying decision

If you and your team are not taking advantage of Jobs To Be Done style interviews during customer & market research — you may be digging for copper when you could be striking gold. The keystone of…

Jobs theory

A Script To Kickstart Your Jobs To Be Done Interviews

A. Improving the quality/speed of experiments run on your website: CRO allows you to analyze the performance of your site by running tests and look for the best possible variations which promise conversions. The more time people stay on your site, the more time they have to like you and progress down the conversion funnel.

CRO like a pro

The CRO process begins with understanding customer behavior through tools like heatmaps and clickmaps. Such tools tell you which site sections visitors spend more time on. Other <a href="https://vwo.com/blog/cro-tools/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">CRO tools </a>, such as user session recordings and session replays, help understand their overall experience. Start using <a href="https://mouseflow.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Moseflow</a> or <a href="https://www.hotjar.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Hotjar</a> to better understand how visitors consume your content.

Tools help you know your customer

In order to provide smooth buying experince you should avoid:<ul><li>Distractions: Too many pop-ups or forms to fill can distract your customers.</li><li>Difficulty of checkout: The site may not offer a friendly check-out option, which may complicate the purchasing efforts of first-time users.</li><li>Hidden costs: Most visitors get intimidated by hidden costs such as additional shipping charges, other taxes, and more.</li></ul>

Quick fixes for ecommerce shops

There are two primary ways to study the behavior of your target audience:<ul><li>Conducting tests and taking in-person interviews: These can include, the pages they most visit, the amount of time they spend on your website, the areas where they’re facing maximum problems such as finding difficulty in filling a form, unable to generate passwords, payment drop-off, and much more.</li><li>Reading case studies and following guidelines on user behavior: Many existing pieces of research and case studies can vastly aid in understanding the collective psyche of your customers. </li></ul>

Understand your customers

Here’s an example of a good hypothesis.“I believe adding social proofs on product pages will result in 5% more add to carts because it instills confidence about my purchasing decision.”Based on this hypothesis, you make the necessary changes on your product pages. These new pages are known as variations. The primary objective of the test will check whether or not the new variation would get better conversions.

Everything starts with a Hypothesis

Understand, CRO isn’t a once and done process. It is rather an ongoing process which demands constant analysis. There’s always some room for improvement no matter how tests you’ve run. Having a well-planned, well-designed CRO process effectively helps in identifying areas of improvements and implement optimization efforts to get better conversions, further drive more revenue.

Consistency brings results

A successful marketer isn’t the one who predicts which test will win basis opinion or inspiration, instead the one who doesn’t let biasness win over statistical data.&nbsp;&nbsp;

If you meassure you can improve

Image carousels do not allow users to explore the site at their own pace. Instead, they hinder with a visitor’s experience and create banner blindness. Here are some reasons to back this theory: <ol><li>The human eye strongly reacts to movements. If images scroll faster than the human eye can see or read, it will definitely miss out on the important stuff.</li><li>Too many messages means no message at all. Instead, focusing on adding on the primary message on your banner images and the required action is always more effective.</li></ol>

Tip #1: carefull with carousel

Remember that the purpose of a website is not to look pretty, but to achieve certain objectives. And, of course, people like to deal with humans, not websites.

Tip #2: Golas > flashy animations

Conversion rate optimization(CRO) is the process of optimizing your website for increasing conversions. Learn tips & strategies in this guide from experts.

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Dario V
@dariov

With Goals, FAST Beats SMART

A Script To Kickstart Your Jobs To Be Done Interviews

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): All Facts You Must Know

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

Dario V@dariov

With Goals, FAST Beats SMART

A Script To Kickstart Your Jobs To Be Done Interviews

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): All Facts You Must Know

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Dario V
@dariov