Skip to main content
Goals are everywhere in product organisations - OKRs, KPIs, performance targets, team objectives. Most of them don’t change much. The problem usually isn’t the framework; it’s the quality of the goal itself and the relationship the person has with it 🎯

​
What makes a goal work

A goal is only useful if it changes what someone does on a given day. That sounds obvious, but most goals fail this test. They’re too vague to act on, too distant to feel urgent, or owned by the organisation rather than the person. A few things that actually make goals stick: Specificity - “improve retention” is a direction. “Increase 30-day retention from 42% to 55% by end of Q2” is a goal. The specificity creates accountability and makes it obvious when you’re on or off track. Relevance - people commit to goals they chose or understand, not goals handed to them without context. The why matters as much as the what. A team that understands why a goal matters will find creative ways to hit it; one that doesn’t will do the minimum 💡 Achievable but stretching - the research on goal-setting (Locke and Latham’s work is the classic reference) consistently shows that harder goals produce better performance than easy ones - up to the point where they feel impossible and people disengage. The sweet spot is ambitious but credible. Feedback loops - goals without regular check-ins drift. Knowing how you’re tracking against a goal is what allows adjustment. Weekly or fortnightly reviews of progress matter more than the goal-setting ceremony itself.

​
Individual vs. team goals

Both matter and they create different dynamics. Team goals build shared accountability - everyone pulls toward the same outcome. Individual goals create personal ownership and connect to development. The failure mode is individual goals that compete with team goals - or worse, individual goals that can be hit by behaviour that hurts the team. Goal design is incentive design, and incentives always get gamed eventually 🙌

​
Goals and OKRs

OKRs are a specific framework for goal-setting. The principles here apply inside any framework - the quality of the goal matters regardless of what you call the system. Christina Wodtke’s Radical Focus is the best practical read on making goals actually work - especially the cadence of check-ins and the discipline of committing to one goal at a time. Lesson learned: the most common goal-setting failure I’ve seen isn’t setting the wrong goal - it’s setting the right goal and then never talking about it again until the quarter-end review.