Goal Setting and OKRs

"AI tooling will become increasingly smart at suggesting goals you should be optimizing for, based on your strategy, business requirements, and constraints. PMs will become editors of super-intelligent suggestions."

"I asked teams to instead define headlines—essentially, claims that they’d like to make by the end of some time period. For example, it might be something like “Figma is the most efficient way to design,” and the team offers both quantitative and qualitative ways to evaluate that claim."

"We tried using OKRs at Gong at some stage across the company, but we found out that the process of updating OKRs to align with reality was time-consuming and the framework did not provide us with enough benefits to justify the effort."

"We also don’t have metrics goals for the product or any projects, but we do have a North Star company-level metric goal. For a B2B tool like ours that takes some time for a company to adopt the tool or any new feature, setting specific metrics goals and measuring progress doesn’t seem that useful and more often can lead you astray."

"So we’ve removed extra layers and now have Company-, AMPED-, and Product Stream-level OKRs, with each team just deciding which OKRs they will support. It has brought much-needed alignment and clarity to teams."

"In other areas, things are sufficiently nascent that a lot of our key results end up being like “ship this thing,” and it has frankly been a journey for us to figure out when so much of what we’re trying to do is zero-to-one work, and how we actually measure success."

"Each week we have a kickoff meeting where everyone sets high-level expectations for their week. We have a culture of setting 75% weekly goals: everyone identifies their top priority for the week and tries to hit 75% of that by the end of the week."

"I think Tobi just does not agree with that philosophy of product development and thinks that you end up with a lot of micro-optimizations of local maxima that may say you drove that number up, but the product just doesn’t feel good anymore."

"We try to imagine a Shopify merchant writing an email to a friend where they say, 'Here’s why I love Shopify, and here’s why I’m going to keep using it for my business.'"

"When you define quarterly goals, invite your whole team to participate. Use the time to reflect on how you did last quarter and consider where to focus this quarter."

"Goals are simply a way to measure the progress of your strategy toward achieving your ultimate vision."

"Operationalize: Build this metric into your team workflows. Find a cadence of checking in on this metric individually with your team, and with management. Share progress on the goal frequently."

"Similarly, projects often look delicious to team members because they're each imagining different goals — goals that they are personally most excited about (e.g. increase conversion vs. make users happier vs. refactoring code). A product leader’s job is to unwrap the burrito and make sure everyone is seeing the same thing."

"You start with your Mission (what are you trying to achieve), which informs your Vision (what does the world look like when you achieve it), which then leads to your Strategy (how you plan to get there). What comes next? You need to find a way to tell whether you're successfully executing your Strategy (and thus your vision and mission). That's where goals come in."

"Some of the things people call design goals are consistency, usability, accessibility, and delight. Guess what. All of these things drive use, conversion, and loyalty. All things that are critical to the success of the business."