Product Leader Goal-Setting Stack
An actionable battle-tested framework that will allow product leaders to create clarity for their teams and stakeholders.
When joining a new team - you might feel like tiptoeing in complete uncertainty. What’s the long-term goal? What are the operational targets? Some diligent teams might have everything clearly mapped, on the other hand, some might have a mish-mash of google sheets spiced up with internal jargon and unvoiced wisdom, accumulated over time. Both might work, it all depends on the context and maturity of the business.
I’m a big proponent of clarity and assume that no matter what context you find yourself in, you have to establish structure. Not only it will help you uncover some new insights, but you will also have better alignment across teams and fewer costs for onboarding new hires.
There’s a ton (sorry, megatonne) of content written on the topic of goal-setting, but most of it is either too academic or too high-level (there are some exceptions, of course). I want to add a few grams of weight to that knowledge and share the system that has so far worked well for me - I call it the goal-setting stack.
Goal-Setting Stack
It is a set of interconnected elements that you absolutely need to establish once you start leading a team.
Each element has two parameters:
time horizon;
confidence level.
When vision should have a longer time horizon (usually 3-5 years) and lower confidence levels based on aspirations, weekly indicators should be focused on a short timeframe (ideally a week) and be based on actual business/product metrics.
Some of the elements might already be present in the team so you can integrate them into your stack, but some might be missing, causing the inevitable dilution of focus.
Diving deeper
Vision
In many cases when you’re a newly baked product leader (GPM/Director/VP level), you might start working in a pre-defined “vision” context (set up by the C-level management). This context would further feed into your product strategy and can serve as a guiding principle for the selection of your annual bets.
Product Strategy
A document, outlining the “where to play” (your key challenges) and “how to win” (your key bets to address those challenges). Your organizational structure is later defined by the product strategy. Defining a product strategy is a process of rethinking your business from the ground up and requires the hands-on facilitation of the whole team (Note that I purposefully make no distinction between a business and a product). The ultimate guide on how to build one would be shared in the upcoming articles.
Roadmap
A doc/sheet that outlines a critical path for each of the key bets from your strategy with clearly defined milestones. There are plenty of ways/approaches to draft roadmaps - don’t overthink them. Even if you’re roadmap isn’t a roadmap per se, but a Gantt chart, It would still come a long way.
Quarterly Goals
A doc breaking down your key bets into actionable chunks (goals) with a clear narrative and a set of commitments. Invaluable for focus, accountability, and transparency - upward (with senior stakeholders), across (with cross-functional peers), and downward (for your direct reports).
You can use whatever framework works. Many companies advocate for OKR. In my practice, OKR by no means is a silver bullet and has a bunch of shortcomings, which I will talk about in later articles.
Weekly indicators
A sheet/board that tracks the health of your business (Topline/Costs/Bottomline e.t.c.), product (very high level - CAC/LTV, Activation, Retention e.t.c.), and measures the diff against the planned budget/set goals.
For a long time, my personal bias was juggling around between multiple dashboards and sheets in order to track progress and identify bottlenecks. This is cognitive overload 101. Don’t repeat my mistake. Invest in building a proper health tracking tool that would have all the metrics you need in one place, you would be surprised how much time and effort you save down the line.
Spend 30 min - 1 hour to go over them at the beginning of the week, identify your areas of focus, and shape weekly priorities. This will help you to think proactively about business opportunities and not just react to inputs that come from your stakeholders.
Personal backlog
On the lowest level of granularity are your personal tasks. You should set them based on the existing goal stack and live market inputs, define the highest-leverage activities and get going. Another valuable addition is the ability to track your outputs w-o-w and understand trends/correlations.
There’s one relevant quote from Jim Rohn, highlighting the importance of this:
Never begin the day until it is finished on paper.
Cadence
Each component should have an update cadence that is equal to a time horizon (e.g. we revisit the product strategy each Nov-Dec before the new financial year kicks in).
Some of the stack elements have high business value (Strategy/Quarterly goals). Hence, not only do you need to factor in preparation cadence, but also the stage-gate review process with key stakeholders.
Diagnostics
If your team/company is missing any of the elements within the stack - the problems would eventually bubble up. You can even try to run some preliminary diagnostics.
Missing vision - strategy becomes diluted with too many focus areas;
Missing strategy - foggy roadmap with too many focus areas that are stretched onto existing vision;
Missing roadmap - team loses focus on key commitments and jumps between goals, ETAs become blurred, delivery metrics suffer;
Missing goals - accountability is disrupted, there’s no clarity on the team’s progress;
Missing weekly indicators - you have no idea how your business/product performs and become reactive to the inputs coming from high-powered stakeholders.
The more elements of the stack are missing, the more evident the dilution of focus becomes. In extreme cases when all of the elements in the stack are missing - your team is operating in total chaos. Chaos is a breeding ground for power plays and politics.
Bottomline
To create a solid plan, you should start by thinking about your goals in different timeframes. This means building off of your company’s long-term vision and creating a clear product strategy that breaks down into smaller goals for each quarter and even weekly tasks.
Having a structure for your work is crucial as it brings focus and alignment, increases output, and reduces costs for the company. At the end of the day, the working climate in such teams is more constructive and the employee attrition rate is lower.