How can you set and measure goals for your product team?

Setting goal also 1. helps you align your product vision and strategy with the needs and expectations of your customers, stakeholders, and partners. By setting goals that are customer-centric, value-driven, and outcome-oriented, you can ensure that your product delivers the right solutions to the right problems for the right people. 2. helps you foster a culture of innovation and experimentation within your product team. By setting goals that are challenging, realistic, and adaptable, you can encourage your team members to explore new ideas, test different hypotheses, and learn from their failures and successes. This can help you create a product that is continuously improving and evolving.

Why do you put in a destination when navigating to a new place? To help you get there. Without knowing where we want to go, how can we ever get there? Goals help your product team move faster towards a unified outcome and avoid wasted effort. You can take this a step further and aim to align your product team goals with company-level goals. Build a muscle to tie your objectives to company revenue metrics early on. If you are able to map product goals to company revenue, your strategy and ability to stay focused will be that much more simple.

Another understated "why" is that, documented goals can empower product managers/owners to say "No" - to new requests that do not move the needle wrt the specific product/release goal.

In today's world, maintaining team motivation is a challenge amid constant distractions. One effective strategy that has been tried and proven is establishing realistic goals with clear milestones and tracking progress. These goals should strike a balance, being challenging yet attainable and truly rewarding - fostering collaboration among team members. Yet, here's the often-overlooked secret: setting these goals should be a team effort. Involving everyone in defining goals and expectations taps into the team's collective wisdom, ensuring a realistic assessment of capabilities. By doing this collaboratively, the team is better positioned to concentrate efforts on what truly matters. Remember, goals SHOULD adapt to changing circumstances.

Remember to set goals that map to the user problem or job to be done that you are trying to solve. If you set goals that are too narrow or focus on a specific outcome (i.e. drive feature adoption, maximize email CTR) you can inadvertently cause other problems: 1) You can artificially constrain the team's creativity and ability to pivot. Ex - focusing on adoption of a specific feature can prevent them from introducing a new capability that eliminates the need for the feature completely. 2) You can incentivize behavior that actually long-term harms outcomes. Ex - maximizing CTR can lead to poor conversion rates and long-term user dissatisfaction when there's not actually a compelling product/feature fit.

Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) is a popular goal-setting framework for product teams. As opposed to a Key Performance Indicator approach (which helps assess progress against performance-related metrics), the OKRs approach is often considered more inspirational and easier to understand.

Frameworks, while beneficial, come with limitations. They serve as a good starting point for goal-setting, yet it's crucial to view them as guiding tools rather than rigid molds. In today's agile world, many frameworks are too inflexible, aiming for a one-size-fits-all approach that doesn't suit every team or scenario. Moreover, their complexity often confuses and overwhelms team members, shifting the focus toward process rather than purpose and stifling innovation. My suggestion? Choose a framework as a guide and tailor it to your team's specific needs. Embrace its structure while allowing flexibility for adaptation, ensuring it complements your team's dynamics rather than constraining them.

Tie them to company objectives first and foremost. Iterate on OKR structure and measurably and don’t be afraid to start small. If it’s not measurable, it’s not an OKR. Your systems might need to become more sophisticated and instrumented to produce valuable data. Make that part of the evolution and maturity of your program. Iterate and refine quarterly if you aren’t surfacing valuable results. This is a true learning experience and without rigidity, teams will adopt the practice and learn as they go.

To create product objectives, it's important to have already a company goal that should be working as an umbrella for the other themes below, for instance, the structure could be: Company goals Product objectives Initiatives Hypothesis Experiments You can track initiatives results to understand how the product team is impacting the company and product expected outcomes.

You can use dashboards to track key metrics and the achievement of targets. Also, documentation to share the results from initiatives and experiments that were completed and have impacted the target's achievement. Also, I think is valuable to have some recurrent meetings to follow up on the key metrics and discuss with the team and stakeholders about the initiatives, challenges, and insights from the product experiments, research, and studies.