Goal Setting the Hard Way

I have observed that people who are involved in the goal setting process seem to be more committed to achieving the outcomes. Some of my experience with this comes from leading product teams in SAAS companies, and some of it comes from trying to get teenagers to do literally anything.

In the product world, I think most people agree that a good OKR process should avoid handing down objectives, key results, or even pre-baked ideas about indicators to product teams. A good goal-setting experience has the team working together to develop these ideas. The experience of negotiating goals as a team, staking KRs against each other, weighing the merits of different objectives, is extraordinarily valuable team-building work.

Back at home, we’ve tried to supply our children with a sense of agency over their academic lives, both in a day-to-day sense and in the arc of their careers. We’ve tried to supply as many options as possible, to talk about tradeoffs, and to give the sense that the future is theirs to invent.

I can remember experiences as a teenager and as an adult when I have had the sense that important decisions had been made for me… that didn’t turn out well. I think everybody who has worked on a team has had a similar experience.

This is why I think it’s really healthy to see the Product Roadmap process run in the same way, or made part of, a team-driven bottom-up OKR process. All of the important roadmap decisions can be connected directly to the goal setting conversations, in the same room, by the same people.

If other teams or people want to tinker with the roadmap, during that process or later, they should do in that same context: Working with the entire team. And they’ll need to engage with how roadmap priorities interconnect with signals, KRs, and Objectives.

This topic is too complicated for a short post. But I would love to hear your ideas or tips about how to ensure that teams stay bought in to the work they’re doing. I think the Roadmap is the most important canvas for this, so I’m especially interest in how you manage team governance of those changes.