Setting Tough Goals

A goal is something you count in order to track progress toward something you're trying to accomplish. It's a singularly effective management tool for harmonizing the actions of large groups while also encouraging initiative and rapid decision making.

There are two types of goals:

• Metric goals count something your users do, like opening the app, or experience, like waiting for a tab to load.
• Milestone goals count something you do; the completion of milestones toward a large initiative or project.

Metric goals are usually better than milestones goals because they focus work on what matters most, outcomes, and give teams flexibility on how to achieve them. Milestones can be a better choice when you have deliverables with hard to measure outcomes or long development timelines. In such cases, breaking down the project into manageable milestones provides structure and a clear sense of progress.

Choose a success metric or define milestones. When choosing a success metric, begin with the simplest thing you can count. Then add complexity, as needed, in order to better fit the evaluation criteria below.

Criteria for Success Metric	Criteria for Milestones
A. Easy to understand and explain	A. Easy to understand and explain
B. Tied to other valuable outcomes	B. Clear success criteria
C. Outwardly focused	C. Spaced-out over time
D. Easy to benchmark	D. Memorable
E. Hard to game
F. Movable

Set a 50/50 target, meaning you have a 50% chance of success, assuming your team executes well. Aggressive targets inspire teams to stretch their abilities, enable risk taking, and help us learn from failures. At the end of the day, there's two ways we can fail. We can miss our goal targets. Or we can hit our targets and realize after the fact they didn't matter.

Example Goals

Goal	As of	Status	Current	Target	Expected
Grow DAU	02/05	🟢	45M	50M	60M
Grow MAU	02/05	🟡	150M	180M	175M
GTP in Bing (milestones)	02/05	🔴	1	4	2