Okay, so goals matter. They matter a ton. They are important for aligning every stakeholder from the CEO to the engineer with hands on keyboard.
You need to lock down your product goals, but they are nothing on their own. They need to support your company’s goals. Quite often, especially in a dynamic environment your company goals aren’t entirely finished when you need to do product planning. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, in fact, it can be an opportunity.
Company goals and product goals are very close. You can work directly with your CEO/President or whomever sets your company goals to get to a few (no more than 3) company goals. I’ve found myself on many occasions being the driver of company goals, that’s okay, and I think ultimately its helpful because if they aren’t yet established you can influence them.
Once you have the company goals, sit with your team and brainstorm product goals to support the company goals. Identify metrics to help you know if you were successful or not. Here is an example:
Company Goals:
Grow Life Time Value of our customers by 20%
Increase the number of large customers from 200 to 300
Product Goals:
Deliver NEW add-ons increasing average revenue per customer from $150/month to $200/month
Increase the conversion rate for large customers from from 2% to 10%
Reduce churn for large customers from 4% to 2%
Don’t worry if there is overlap, there always is but that’s okay. They key is that now that you have your goals and you can socialize and get everyone on board. Often you get feedback when socializing which is great and may result in some modifications to your goals.
Not all goals are created equal. Now is the time to assign some weighting to your product goals. They should add up to “1”. We will use this weighting to help us rank our customer problems in later steps.
Rating
Deliver NEW add-ons increasing average revenue per customer from $150/month to $200/month (50%)
Increase the conversion rate for large customers from from 2% to 10% (35%)
Reduce churn for large customers from 4% to 2% (15%)
This is a critical step and once you are there and have alignment from stakeholders everything else will go smoothly. On to step 2!