TBM 324: Goal-O-Rama

I will be back to my normal “messy” content after the Thanksgiving break. I still have a couple spots left in my prioritization workshop on December 12th.

I recently worked with a team and noticed their goals looked identical—like Target Goals (see below). I encouraged them to mix things up and mix/match different types of goals. They seemed to enjoy the exercise. Here are some goal types we ended up with, along with a personal health and product example.

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Overarching/Primary Goal

Overarching/Primary Goals are long-term, descriptive, compelling, and paint broad brushstrokes. They must be specific enough to draw a reasonable box around the effort without forcing premature convergence and solutioning. These map to "objectives" in textbook OKRs.

🥦"Maintain a healthy goal weight through sustainable habits, feeling strong, energized, and confident in my body while fostering a positive relationship with food and exercise."

🐝"Expand and strengthen the Local Advocate Program to build a grassroots network of passionate beekeepers who promote our products, share insights, and foster community engagement."

Target Goals

Target Goals emphasize hitting a target or threshold by a certain date. Hitting this target should be a big moment and cause for celebration instead of a transient milestone (see below). Yes, you might enter a new phase—for example, trying to keep a metric below a threshold—but the target is more than just a stepping stone.

🥦"Hit 150 lbs by June 1st."

🐝"Increase 90-day retention rate from 60% to 75% by December 31st, focusing on improved onboarding experiences and proactive customer support during the first month."

Anti-goals (aka NOKRs)

Anti-goals (aka NOKRs) explicitly state what you aren't trying to do. They help set expectations and clarify your strategy. A good exercise for setting anti-goals is to ask, "What might someone reasonably assume might happen because of our work that will likely NOT happen?"

🥦"No diet plans that eliminate entire food groups (e.g., no-carb diets)."

🐝"We are not going to attempt to shift our in-person community events to online events, despite their higher costs, because the in-person format fosters deeper connections and trust that are critical for our beekeeper community."

Continuous, Progress-Oriented Goals

Continuous, Progress-Oriented Goals are helpful when you are chipping away at something and want to ensure regular progress. They are time-based and use a consistent period.

🥦"Lose an average of 1 lb per week over the next 3 months."

🐝"Refactor and update 10 legacy UI components per month to align with the Nectar design system, prioritizing high-traffic and customer-facing features. Assess impact after six months."

Milestone-Oriented Goals

Milestone-Oriented Goals cover important points along the journey. It is important to have meaningful milestones. Teams often fall into the trap of specifying milestones that don't mean much. They look at an initiative and ask, "Hey, where will we be by the end of the quarter?" That becomes their next milestone. In my book, this isn't a good goal because hitting some arbitrary target tells us very little about the progress the team is making (which is why I hate burndown charts). Instead, focus on key inflection points that signify big risk/impact profile shifts.

🥦"Weigh 170 lbs by March 1st, representing a 10 lb weight reduction."

🐝 "Successfully onboard the 20th high-touch customer by March 15th, informing and streamlining the onboarding process and reducing risks associated with scaling to lower-touch workflows."

Process-Oriented Goals

Process-Oriented Goals focus on key habits, behaviors, and activities—the "inputs" that we hypothesize will generate the "outputs" (or outcomes) we desire. If you commit to reassessing their efficacy later, it is OK if these goals feel prescriptive and specific.

🥦"Walk 10,000 steps daily, track meals consistently, and include a protein-rich snack to support energy levels, limit eating out to twice per week."

🐝"Conduct at least five customer calls per week with at least two team members present on each call to promote shared learning, alignment, and deeper customer understanding."

Guardrail/Counterbalancing Goals

Guardrail/Counterbalancing Goals prevent optimizing for one outcome at the expense of something else. These goals answer, "While we are trying to achieve X, what must we ensure we don't negatively impact?" In many cases, especially with more exploratory work, keeping some control and visibility of the side effects can be even more important than hitting the made-up, "feels right" main target.

🥦"Keep total caloric deficit under 1,500 calories for any three-day period."

🐝"While optimizing new customer acquisition through increased marketing spend, maintain a 90-day churn rate below 5%."

Leading/Lagging Goals

Leading/Lagging Goals are helpful when you want to be explicit about a hypothesized relationship between a leading input and a lagging output. Ideally, we want teams to focus on controllable inputs while keeping the end goal (based on the lagging metric) in view. Perhaps most importantly, we want the team to be in learning mode, checking both metrics and assessing the relationship between the leading and lagging metrics.

🥦Leading Goal: "Increase daily protein intake to 100g and strength training sessions to 3 per week."

🥦Lagging Metric: "Gain 5 lbs of lean muscle mass within the next 6 months."

🐝Leading Goal: "Increase local advocate referrals by 15% by June."

🐝Lagging Metric(s): "Increase presence in key markets (e.g., rural commercial beekeepers) by 10% through referrals by December. Improve 6-month retention for referred customers to 80%, compared to 70% for non-referred customers."

Maintenance Goals

Maintenance Goals make sure you sustain your progress and gains. They are useful for avoiding regression and making sure your wins stick. You might also think of these as perpetual counterbalancing goals.

🥦"Maintain an average of 8 hours of sleep per night to support recovery and overall health."

🐝"Ensure the Hive Insights Dashboard, launched earlier this year, continues to deliver value by maintaining at least 80% monthly active usage among customers with 10+ hives."

Project Goals

Project Goals cover situations where you just need to get something done. These are best for when the project is a prerequisite ("We can't achieve outcome X unless we finish Project Y first") or when the Goal is checking a box. When building something to achieve a goal, I think it is best to classify the project as a milestone because finishing something is a liability/risk until you've achieved the actual outcome.

🥦"Set up a home gym by the end of the month."

🐝"Project Honeycomb! Complete migrating from the legacy MySQL database to a scalable AWS Aurora solution by June 30th, including re-indexing all 5 million customer records."

(This might not be a great example because, ostensibly, you're migrating for a reason, not just for kicks.)

Adaptive Goals

Adaptive Goals acknowledge that you will likely encounter a lot of unknowns. You are committing to adapt to change circumstances—keeping some broad principles in mind—but adapting your approach within some sensible boundaries. Adaptive Goals and Counterbalancing Goals go well together, and of course, you can still have targets and milestones.

🥦"Adjust calorie intake and exercise goals weekly based on measurable trends such as weight, energy levels, recovery times, and stress levels while accounting for real-life constraints like social events, travel, or work commitments. Do 2 workouts per week, minimum, and use a flexible calorie range to ensure sustainability. Review adjustments every Sunday evening, using the past week's data to fine-tune for the following week."

🐝"Continuously monitor and adjust ad spend, landing page performance, and keyword targeting weekly to maintain a steady lead volume of 200 qualified leads per month while ensuring a cost-per-lead below $50. If ad spend exceeds the cost-per-lead threshold for two consecutive weeks, pause campaigns and reassess landing page performance."

Exploratory/Learning Goals

Exploratory/Learning Goals are helpful when you know you need to learn more about something. You might have a specific decision in mind (see below) or start with a more divergent, exploratory research direction.

🥦"Try three new types of exercise (e.g., yoga, running, weightlifting) to identify what feels most enjoyable and effective."

🐝"Learn how commercial beekeepers assess hive health, including key metrics they prioritize and tools they currently use, to identify opportunities for integrating these metrics into our Hive Insights Dashboard and ensuring it aligns with their workflows."

Decision-Based Goals (including Pivot/Proceed Goals)

With Decision-Based Goals (including Pivot/Proceed Goals), you commit to making a decision by a certain time and ideally having a sense of your options. I see these as more concrete than exploratory goals, which might be more directional and open-ended. Setting a goal to decide something ahead of time is a great way to counteract the confirmation bias that creeps up once you are in the thick of it.

🥦"Decide by February 1st whether to prioritize aerobic exercise or strength-based training based on fitness goals and weight-loss progress."

🐝"Decide by April 1st whether to introduce a mid-tier pricing plan with advanced hive management features based on pilot program results, cost analysis, and projected retention impact."

Capability-building Goals

Capability-building Goals help build skills, knowledge, or, more generally, "the ability to ____________." They increase one's capacity to achieve future goals. The word "capability" is frequently used to describe things our products and services need to do, but I think it's worthwhile to figure out how you want to talk about internal capabilities as well.

🥦"Learn how to meal prep effectively and track macros to make healthy eating more efficient."

🐝"Develop the capability to support queen breeding operations for advanced commercial beekeepers by training the support team on best practices and launching dedicated resources by April 30th."

Hope that was helpful!