Do You Need S.M.A.R.T. Goals?

Common goal-setting advice encourages us to set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (S.M.A.R.T.) goals. The research on goal setting, however, muddies the waters.

Researchers have found that teams that set specific, challenging goals outperform teams who don’t. Challenging goals create focus, inspire effort and persistence, and help to surface relevant organizational knowledge. However, there are some caveats. The team has to believe that they can achieve the goal, and they need to be committed to the goal, further supporting the idea that teams need to be involved in defining their own outcomes. Teams also need continuous feedback on their progress toward their goal, supporting the argument that goals should be measurable.¹⁷

However, much of this goal-setting research was conducted using simple, straightforward tasks. More recent research on goal setting involving more complex tasks, like the ones product trios face, found that challenging goals can decrease performance if the team doesn’t have strategies for how to achieve their goal. These studies found that encouraging teams to “do their best” was more effective than setting specific, challenging goals. Additionally, these studies found that setting an initial learning goal (e.g., discover the strategies that might work) was more effective than setting a performance goal. Only once appropriate strategies were identified did performance increase with a specific, challenging performance goal.¹⁸

This research suggests that product trios, when faced with a new outcome, should first start with a learning goal (e.g., discover the opportunities that will drive engagement) before being tasked with a performance goal (e.g., increase engagement by 10%). This approach can be particularly helpful because it’s common to have uncertainty around the best way to measure your outcome. We often need to do some discovery to learn how to best measure a product outcome. For example, when Sonja’s team started investigating retention as an outcome, they had no idea what they would uncover. Rather than spinning their wheels trying to define the perfect, specific, measurable retention metric, her team focused on learning what led to churn and used that knowledge to revise their metric over time.

S.M.A.R.T. goals play a role and are common for trios that have experience with their product outcomes. But it’s not one-size-fits-all. It’s perfectly fine to start with a learning goal and work your way toward a S.M.A.R.T. performance goal.