How We Set Goals

The questions we ask ourselves every quarter:

• How did we do with last quarter’s goals? If we missed them, why, and does anything need to change to hit this quarter’s goals?
• What debt do we have? Technical, experiential, organizational, financial? Prioritised by order of impact (if the debt is called how bad does it mess us up).
• Where are the holes in our job to be done for our customers? Where do we under serve? Where do we over serve? Listed by order of impact.
• Based upon the above what do we feel the team’s goals for the coming quarter should be? Prioritized on first eliminating debt if we have any. We want no surprises. And then secondly optimizing our job to done.
• How do we measure the success of our goals? What are our key performance indicators that we use to measure our progress?

At this point we now move from individual opinions and reach consensus, not always democratically if consensus can’t be reached, but ideally by consensus, as to what the team goals are for the quarter and what the measures of success should be. Then we move to:

• What do we need to learn this quarter to help us achieve our goals?
• Do we have a really big problem that we should organize a multi disciplinary design sprint around? Ideally each team should have a design sprint every quarter or two.
• Are there 10X opportunities outside of what we do now that we missed? Are they big enough, and worth enough, to consider forming a new team to pursue them? Not add on to an existing team’s objectives, rather form a new team to pursue.