Setting Goals, Planning and Executing

Setting Goals

The Goals depend on 2 main factors:

• The type of business, product, market. (example: e-commerce goals are different than SaaS goals)
• The phase (or the goal) the company is in right now. Example: startups goals are different than a mature company goals, do we need more users now, or instead we have enough users, but we need revenue?

Metrics should cover the customer life-cycle stages, look at how a user interacts with the product/service, from finding the product all the way to buying something (depending on type of business) and create a funnel that looks at each of the stages, typically: acquisition > activation > retention (and churn) > revenue.

Setting Goals

• Financially: They need to be able to support financially the endeavor
• Find what are the typical values for the business with similar biz model. To know whether under or over-performing. For example, might turn out that the biz current the churn rate is perfectly normal and more importantly, we probably aren’t going to be able to move the needle even when investing heavily on it, better invest resources elsewhere.
• Also depend on the current company phase, where goals in a startup company are different from mature company.

Reference: Lean Analytics

Planning

Given the goals it is then needed to make a plan on what are the individuals steps needed, how others contribute, etc…

Executing

Scrum

OKRs

Objectives and Key Results

Why ?

• Focus: What do we do and what do we not do as a company?
• Alignment: How do we make sure the entire company focuses on what matters most?
• Acceleration: Is your team really reaching its potential?

References:

• http://eleganthack.com/the-art-of-the-okr/
• http://eleganthack.com/why-use-okrs/