Objective Setting

Objective setting involves defining clear, measurable, and time-bound goals that align with the product vision and business strategy. These objectives guide decision-making, prioritize initiatives, and motivate the team. They are often set at multiple levels, including company-wide objectives, product-specific objectives, and team or individual objectives. It’s common for the company to set these goals on a regular basis, such as quarterly.

Example

Imagine you’re a Product Manager at a ride-sharing company, like Lyft, and it’s the end of June (Q2) which marks the time to update your product’s quarterly objectives. The previous quarter saw a lack of growth in daily riders and there’s some fear that it could continue to trend downwards. As a result, the leadership team has asked everyone at the company to focus on increasing the number of new rides and improving user retention. More specifically, the company wants to increase the number of unique rides by 10% over the next 3 months.

As the PM who is responsible for the Driver mobile app experience, you start to dig through old notes, usage data, and talk with key members of your team to brainstorm objectives. You decide to use the Objective Key Results (OKR) framework, and you outline your top objectives and the key results you expect from each.

Your engineering manager rehashes a previously explored concept of an enhanced navigation system, which would make rides faster and more enjoyable for the passenger, helping you write your first objective “Increase riders satisfaction by optimizing routes for drop-off, turns, and travel-time”. You hypothesize that if you update the earnings screen for drivers that it will incentivize drivers to be more responsive with rides, which would increase ridership. You then write a matching objective. Your boss reminds you of an in-app chat feature enabling users and drivers to better communicate, especially at the time of pick up, which you write your third objective for.

After additional concepts are considered, you land on these three as the most impactful towards increasing ridership and start building out the key results that would come from each of these. You start with the enhanced navigation system feature and you think through the things you hope to achieve. You then outline these three key results: (1) increase time in app, since drivers won’t be switching to other navigation apps, (2) decrease in complaints from riders regarding delays, and (3) increase in the quality of the drop-off locations of riders. You repeat this exercise with each of the objectives and share your team’s OKRs with your manager for input and sign-off.

Your manager is happy with the OKRs as it provides a clear direction for prioritizing features and initiatives that can help achieve this objective.

Pain Points

Setting effective objectives can be challenging. It requires a deep understanding of the business strategy, market dynamics, and user needs. Objectives also need to be realistic and achievable, yet ambitious enough to drive progress and improvement.

Practical Exercise

Reflect on your product or a product you use regularly. What could be a potential objective for this product? How does this objective align with the product's mission and vision? How would you measure progress towards this objective?

Related Research Topics

• OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) [ Google | Perplexity ]

• SMART goals (Specific [ Google | Perplexity ]

• Measurable [ Google | Perplexity ]

• Achievable [ Google | Perplexity ]

• Relevant [ Google | Perplexity ]

• Time-bound) [ Google | Perplexity ]

• KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) [ Google | Perplexity ]

• Goal setting theory [ Google | Perplexity ]

• Aligning product and business objectives. [ Google | Perplexity ]