24/01/2021
A little intro about our work.
Intro
Every company or individual has growth goals. Goals are a great tool to challenge the team to reach significant growth milestones, and increase employee motivation. However, setting a good goal is important. For example, if a goal doesn’t seem achievable, people may become demoralized and not feel motivated to reach it. On the flip side, if the goals are too easily achievable, there may be a lack of motivation to perform. A common framework for setting goals is the SMART framework: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. In my opinion, Specific, Measurable, and Time-bound are more straightforward than Achievable and Relevant, access you potential, finding the gaps and set up the goal is the key to achieve desired result for your team and organization.
Achievable
When determining whether or not a goal is achievable, I use two main factors: Historical context and resourcing.
Historical context is probably your biggest indicator of what is possible. Without it, it’s very hard to set goals with confidence, so I would actually recommend waiting until you have some historical context before setting concrete goals. When considering historical context it is important to be aware of a few factors: seasonality, product changes, press, etc. After you determine these factors, categorize them into one-time events or recurring. For example, if a boost was due to press or product changes, it is likely one-time. Then, try to determine a possible range of growth rates if you remove the one-time events. This range will be a good indicator of what a good goal may be.
Resourcing is another big factor in determining what kind of goal is possible. For small growth teams, this is especially important because going from 2 to 3 people can be a big difference. However, here are a few things to consider when it comes to resourcing:
• New engineers take time to ramp up and learn growth. The median time until shipping a first significant win is usually over 3 months. So, I usually don’t let new hires affect the projection too much.
• For early growth teams, significant time will have to be spent developing basic experimentation tools. For later stage growth teams, more time will have to be spent on maintaining growth features.
• Employee attrition is possible but usually ends up being 0-1 people per time period, so I usually don’t factor it in unless it is known well in advance someone will leave.
Using these two factors, you can probably come up with two numbers: the baseline, which is where the metric would reach if the team didn’t make any improvements, and the ideal forecast, which is what may happen if a lot of wins are shipped. Your goal should be somewhere between these two numbers, but probably closer to the ideal forecast in order to challenge and motivate the team.
Relevant
The two factors I use to determine if a goal is relevant are team influence and correlation with company success.
Team influence is how much a team can influence the goal. Engagement with sales results is always better metric because it is something they have more control over by optimizing sales process.
Correlation with company success is important in the world of vanity metrics. Sometimes, teams set goals like “Number of people who perform action X” or “Number of people who use feature Y” in an attempt to make the goal very influenced by the team, since the team owns X or Y. This is only fine as long as X and Y are directly tied with company success. This is why it’s important for companies to decide what user actions are most important, and have every team make goals based on those.
Putting it all together -
On the growth team, we have to try a bunch of different successful goal metrics from the past.
We can add every growth sub team goals on the same metric that’s relevant to the company and easily influenced by the team. It’s worked well and we’ve can use it for a while, so we also have the historical context to be able to set achievable goals.
Takeaways
• Goal setting is important to motivate and challenge teams
• To make achievable goals, take historical context and resourcing into account
• To make relevant goals, make sure the metric you are using can be heavily influenced by the team and is correlated to company success
My Goal is to offer consultancy to companies who have potential and desire but cant reach to their goal due to correct measure of their resources and setting up their Growth Goal.
