Gooooaaal! A Guide For Product Managers from a UXer
Originally written: Jun 12, 2014
In going with all the World Cup hype, I figured I’d write about my favorite subject, goals. As one of my favorite TV personalities, Mike Homes, says, “Do it right the first time!”. The success of a product creation or redesign project depends on starting with goals. At this point, many UXers know how to define a goal using the S.M.A.R.T methodology: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. See Wiki’s article for more information. The thing is, even knowing about S.M.A.R.T or S.M.A.R.T.E.R, we seem to fall short due to listening to the orders that come down from business. This is a call out to those sending down the orders — stop, think, and write smart goals. Why? Because, in reality, you’ll look like a rockstar if you do.
Reason 1
Being the know-it-all
A main component of using smart goals to look like a rockstar is tying them to actual measurements. You have to know your analytics, audience, and/or research in order to even give your goal a number and time that makes sense. Why? Because you’re going to hold yourself to this goal, and you don’t want to look like a fool when you made it way to easy or too hard. Also, you’ll know so much that you can back up all your decisions immediately because of this knowledge. Just make sure you aren’t pulling stats out of thin-air, otherwise you could be in trouble later.
Reason 2
Bringing team members onboard will be a breeze
Are you sick of the meeting to get-stuff-done ratio? Even worse is when you have a meeting to review work, and its all wrong; and this is the 3rd time. Stop blaming your team members, and start looking at how you handed the job off to them, whether it be designers, creative, or development. When you have smart goals with a summary of the background to back them up, you can share this with each member. Don’t just share the goals, give the background! Doing this instead of dictating the solution to the problem, you are going to:
Communicate your need clearly the first time
Ignite your teams creative geniuses because the understand the problem and the goal allowing them to give a plethora of solutions you might have not thought about.
Create a collaborative environment to achieve a goal(s)
Reason 3
You can prove you were right!
Hopefully, if all goes as planned, your research, collaboration, and open communication of goals created one killer solution. Thankfully, you can prove it too. While researching at the start of the project to create your goals, you found places you need to have measurements and what measurements your company already has. Also, you should have set a time period for how long it would take for your solution to meet the goal (t is for timely). When it comes time, you can pull those measurements, and bam! “Here ya go boss, goal achieved!” This is where S.M.A.R.T.E.R comes in: evaluate and reevaluate.
If you didn’t meet your goals, don’t fret, you now can understand why they didn’t work because of the measurements put in place. As G.I. Joe says, “Knowing is half the battle”.
