Goals are often overlooked. 

You get busy with daily tasks and shifting priorities. As a result, goals are forgotten or never made in the first place – this is life sometimes. 

Also, even if you focus on setting and tracking goals, doing so isn’t always easy, especially if you’ve never done this before!

But the good news is that working with goals is easy once you get the hang of it. This is what to do.

1 - Know what makes a good goal 

Goals are easy to set but difficult to create. One key element to understanding how to do so is knowing the difference between good and bad goals. 

Existence and visibility

A good goal is one that exists, and your team knows exists. 

As an EM, you will (or already do) make plenty of mistakes – one of those is failing to communicate your thoughts and assuming your team knows what’s expected of them. Avoid this at all costs – without clear, unifying goals, your team will also make mistakes or veer off-course.

Not tasks

However, you don’t want to mix up goals and daily tasks for engineers to complete – this is a common misconception. 

For example, engineers need to estimate how long they’ll need to finish a specific task. This is not a goal, but the task can help you create one, depending on the result. Such as if the engineer keeps failing to meet estimates, you can use this information to set a goal for them to improve their time management skills.

Clarity, measurability, and conciseness

Once identified, write this goal down and let the engineer know how they can make progress. 

Make sure the goal is:

  • Clear 
  • Measurable
  • Realistic (more on that in the “Reasonability” section below)
  • And concise

For example: by the next one-on-one, PMs should report there are no more last-moment ETA changes, and the engineer gives them a heads-up about problems and complications after spending 50% of the time on the task.

The engineer knows exactly what to do, when, they’ll believe in the goal and work toward achieving it, and you can measure their progress or lack thereof. They can do the same.

What success actually means

Measuring goals is difficult. Most people try measuring in absolutes, but that’s not always the best way to do so.

For example, what if the engineer for the above goal missed one deadline but hit nine? Their rate was 90%, which doesn’t meet the goal of 100%. But what if that 90% was 20% better than their last completion-on-time percentage?

You have multiple ways of viewing this.

One is that they didn’t hit the goal. You were clear, gave them time and support, and they failed. 

Another is that they didn’t hit the goal, but they made progress toward it. Progress wasn’t the goal in this case, but you can use what they’ve done to motivate them to hit the goal next time. 

There’s also the trouble of whether or not you should tell them progress is the goal ahead of time. For some people, this gives them an excuse to only hit whatever the minimum is.

Ultimately, you have to determine what should be counted as success and not. You can adjust this, depending on the result, but if you wanted someone to reach a certain number and they didn’t, then feel comfortable saying they didn’t hit the goal.

Reasonability

Goals must be reasonable. Of course, the problem is that reasonability is subjective. There’s no big red book of reasonable and unreasonable goals.

Take a look at this goal for instance: every engineer on the team should be using AI tools by the end of the month. 

The goal is vague in terms of what tools and why, but let’s put those aside for a moment. Think about your team:

  • Could they hit this goal? 
  • What supports would they need to do so?
  • How can you communicate it clearly to them?
  • Will they understand its value?

Your answers to these questions may be different from other EMs and even your own team!  

So, how do you ensure the goal is as close to reasonable as possible?

By using yourself as a reference and setting the goal. You were an engineer once, so think back. Did you hit similar goals from your EM? Could you hit the one you want to set now?

Determine your goal based on those questions, then set it. Don’t get stuck wondering if something is actually, truly reasonable or not because, again, it’s all subjective anyway.

You could very well think about the above goal for months and even years, research it deeply, send it to universities for study, and you still wouldn’t have a universal answer. Besides, your best data comes from trying something, making mistakes, owning them, and adjusting. This also builds trust with your team as you show them your willingness to learn and improve.

And with enough time and practice, you’ll develop reasonable ideas about what makes reasonable goals. Simultaneously, your team will learn the same.

2 - Practice with personal goals 

You can also get some ideas for and practice with setting goals in your personal life. Even in our non-work lives, we all have things we’d like to achieve. So, consider and write down what personal milestones you’d like to accomplish and how. 

For example, you could:

  • Start a blog
  • Run more
  • Learn a language

Again, whichever one you pick, make it clear, measurable, and concise. Then, build a timeline and break it down into actionable steps. Using the last one as an example, this would look something like: 

  • Goal: achieve level B2 in French over the next six months 
  • Step 1: have two online lessons every week 
  • Step 2: listen to one podcast in French every week 
  • Step 3: complete one page of exercises every week 

Every month, track your progress with these steps and update accordingly. You may find after a couple of months that they’re not working and you were too ambitious – this is fine. Rewrite and analyze them again in another couple of months. 

In an ideal world, you’d get to build your confidence with setting goals in your personal life before having to set them for your team. But you’ll likely have to start doing the latter while still working on the former. Even so, you can still develop some comfort initially and then continue practicing with personal goals alongside work ones.

3 - Learn which ones to set

The most important rule for setting work goals is knowing what you’re talking about. 

This should be simple, but often, people start a job and don’t know exactly what’s expected from them. So, before tackling work goals, make sure you know what you’re doing. 

This requires: 

  1. Talking to your supervisor: Learn their expectations for you and the team as well as what problems they ultimately want you to solve.
  2. Asking for a timeframe: Specifically, ask where you should be in three months, six months, one year, etc. In other words, you want to understand how your work should evolve. 
  3. Suggesting your own vision when needed: Give some examples and check for alignment between you and your supervisor. You can say, “This is what I have in mind for the next month. Does it match what you’re looking for?” 

Also, check in with your peers: ask what they expect from you and your team. Then, use this information to start setting your team’s goals.

But remember, all of this information you’re gathering is so you can set the goals yourself. You can and should ask for guidance and information from your supervisor and peers, but it’s up to you to take what they tell you and turn it into a goal.

For example, maybe they say that last year:

  • Everything took a long time to develop
  • It was super buggy
  • And users were constantly complaining

You can then use this information to provide a clear, unifying direction for your team as well as what success looks like when you get there.

4 - Set them

As we’ve talked about before, your team’s success determines yours. So, your team’s goals are also your goals.

When setting them, balance individual objectives with team-wide ones. Your role is to make sure each member understands how their tasks and growth align with the overall plan, which in turn supports the company’s broader vision.

Doing so requires these steps: 

  1. Setting team goals based on what you’ve learned from your supervisor, peers, and your own observations: Forgetting this information is easy, so keep it somewhere you’ll remember. Set goals that are, again, clear, measurable, and concise.
  2. Aligning individual and team goals: Identify the strengths and weaknesses within your team as they relate to the overall plan. Use these to develop individual plans for your ICs. For example, if a developer excels in back-end work but struggles with front-end tasks, a goal could be to strengthen their front-end skills. 
  3. Breaking goals down into smaller, manageable milestones: For example, if your team’s goal is to reduce the lead time on deployments by 50%, set a milestone such as, “Reduce lead time by 10% in the first month." 
  4. Adjusting as needed: Usually, you’ll adjust based on new information or shifting company priorities. Make sure your team understands that goals are living documents to be revisited and refined as necessary.

5 - Track them

Without tracking, you’ll find it far more difficult to: 

  • Measure progress
  • Make adjustments
  • And celebrate achievements

You can use tools such as Notion or a simple spreadsheet or document. You don’t need anything fancy or complex, just something that works. The key part is staying consistent with checking on goal statuses and updating your tracker regularly with this information. 

This also makes communicating progress (or lack thereof) easier in one-on-one and team meetings, which you should do in both. Regularly sharing these updates ensures everyone on your team knows what they’re doing, where they are, and how they feel about it. You can also use this time to get feedback and improve the process.

Tracking also provides other benefits, such as:

  1. Spotting issues before they become serious problems: For example, if your team is behind on a major project milestone, catching this early allows for adjustments in strategy, additional resources, and better time management.
  2. Determining adjustment needs: As projects evolve or priorities shift, your initial goals may no longer be realistic or relevant. Tracking helps you determine whether a goal needs modifying.
  3. Celebrating successes: Tracking helps you recognize when individuals and the team reach key milestones, giving you the opportunity to share positive and not just constructive feedback with them.
  4. Refining future goals: The more data you have on past performance, the better you can adjust. Tracking allows you to analyze which strategies worked, where the team fell short, and what adjustments you’ll need to make for future initiatives.

The short version: make it a goal to set and track goals

Setting and tracking goals helps you and your team succeed by unifying everyone’s efforts and ensuring they know how what they do contributes to the whole. However, goals aren’t as easy as they might seem, but there are steps you can take to improve your success rate with them.

This includes:

  1. Understanding what makes a good goal: Your team needs to know the goal exists, they shouldn’t be mixed up with tasks, they need to be clear, measurable, and concise, everyone needs to know what success actually means, and the goals need to be reasonable.
  2. Practicing with personal goals: As much as possible, get comfortable setting goals in your personal life before setting work goals.
  3. Learning which goals to set: Talk to your supervisor about their expectations, ask for a timeframe on how the work should evolve, and suggest your own vision when needed. Additionally, talk to your peers about their expectations as well.
  4. Setting your team’s goals: Start with the information you gathered in the previous step, align your team’s individual goals with the overall ones, break them down into smaller milestones, and adjust as needed.
  5. Tracking progress: A simple tool is effective for this step, such as Notion, a document, or spreadsheet. Tracking also makes the goals and progress visible to your team, which makes it easier to discuss successes and setbacks.

Goals are just one – but a very important – part of your role as an EM. Your team needs guidance, and your supervisor and peers will have expectations for you to meet. Goals align all parties and keep everyone moving forward.

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Originally published on Medium.com

Content in this blog post by Alex Ponomarev is licensed under CC BY 4.0.