Clear Goals Drive Clear Results

Everyone agrees that goals matter. Most organizations invest a lot of time and create complicated frameworks to facilitate setting goals for individuals, project teams, practices, business units, and for the entire organization. But often, it seems all the focus and energy for goals is expended upfront identifying and agreeing on goals, then drops off a cliff after that. As a result, most of us don’t really believe in goals anymore, or at least we don’t believe they can drive the outcomes they promise. They can feel performative.

In collaborating with many clients to deliver mobile solutions over the years, I’ve seen a wide spectrum of goals. They range from invisible to so incredibly complex and overly ambitious that teams can’t even explain them, much less convert them into action. It doesn’t have to be this way. Goals can be a powerful tool for bringing focus and shutting down the noise that competes for a busy mobile product team’s attention. But to do that, they must feel inevitable and be so simple and clear that every single person on the team can state them by heart and use them as a lens through which they focus their work every day.

Goals by Committee Don’t Work

Keeping your goals simple and direct seems obvious, but it’s hard to do in practice. There is a lot of handwringing around setting goals because so much is riding on them and often, too many contributing opinions. All too quickly your goals can turn into a manifesto when what you really need is three well-crafted bullets.

The first step to keeping it simple is to not set goals for your mobile app by committee. The goals for your mobile app should be set by the business stakeholder who is accountable for the success of the app. To do this effectively, this individual needs the following:

1. A clear grasp of the organization’s current strategy and goals
2. Baseline metrics for how the app has performed historically
3. Deep understanding of the mobile apps channel and the specific opportunities it lends to your organization’s product or service

Armed with this knowledge they should be able to create at least the first draft of goals for the mobile app that can be shared and refined based on feedback from the Product Management, Design and Technology leads on the team.

Simple, Direct, and Measurable

Effective goals should be written with clear, direct language. There’s no need to overload a goal with exposition or execution-level details. The goal’s only purpose is to communicate what it is, not where it came from or how it should be accomplished. The mobile team should already understand your organization’s top-line strategy and should be able to easily understand how the goal fits into it. It should be up to the team to figure out the specific initiatives to accomplish the goal. Product teams love a meaty problem to solve, so don’t prescribe a solution in the wording of your goals.

Let’s look at an obnoxious example to demonstrate how a goal can collapse under its own weight.

In BroLand’s mission to be the #1 brokerage for NFTs we need to expand the size of our addressable market by engaging the 25 to 40-year-old female demographic. To achieve this, we will add more pictures of kittens, puppies, and bottles of Rosé which should increase the number of daily active users in our mobile app by 20% by the end of Q2.

While exaggerated (and offensive) to make a point, this example provides an unnecessary amount of background on the goal and prescribes a solution. Not only will your team hate you for this goal, but they will likely not remember anything about it because it was too complicated. The business owner crafting this goal will need to think through all this background and ruthlessly prioritize objectives to arrive at the goal, but the goal itself should not show all this consternation. Let’s look at a tidier version of the same goal:

Increase daily active users in the mobile app by 20% by the end of Q2.

This version gets the job done. Does it answer the why or give more context about the what? No, but these things will be obvious to your team. The important thing is they have a metric to move and a deadline. Having these two things will help focus every ideation and planning session.

One Big Goal and Two for Support

From what I’ve written so far, you may be thinking, “well, this is easy, I only ever need to write three goals: increase revenue, increase adoption, and increase retention. Done!” While you’re not entirely wrong, there’s more to it than that. At a business health level, there are ultimately just a handful of metrics people care about, but there are many ways to slice these and distribute them across an organization and its digital channels. Asking the mobile team to drive all the metrics up at the same time quarter over quarter is as effective as giving them no goals at all.

A better approach is to issue one big, audacious goal that drives an important business metric for the mobile app and supplement it with a couple of more specific goals that support it. For example:

1. Increase daily active users in the mobile app by 20% by the end of Q2
2. Increase user engagement with the NiftyDesigner feature by 50%
3. Increase app launches from promo push notifications by 25%

Goal number one is a big lift for a quarter by any standard, but it will focus your team to nudge them out of their comfort zone. You can think of goals two and three as booster rockets for the main goal. While they can and should each be measured on their own merit, they directly contribute to increasing daily active users.

There are side benefits of these two supporting goals that amplify their value. BroLand’s VP of Mobile Product will have a way to focus the team’s attention on improving the NiftyDesigner feature and a way to measure its value to their users. The company’s under-utilized promotional content engine will also get some love and the team will have a chance to refine how they surface promotions through push notifications. You can begin to see how these three simply stated goals will have ripple effects throughout the organization and drive deeper collaboration with other business units at BroLand.

Reflect, Learn, and Improve

The painful truth is that you will sometimes fail to meet even the most perfectly crafted, right-sized goals for your mobile app. No one can see the future, predict pandemics, market crashes, or changes Apple may make in the next version of iOS. But the beauty of having a solid set of goals is that you can learn as much when you fail as when you succeed.

When you fail, have a post-mortem with your team, and be sure you’ve established a safe space for them to talk candidly about what went wrong and why. What did you learn about the updates you made to the toolbar in NiftyDesigner? Maybe iconography without labels was the wrong move and your analytics reporting shows that. Now you have something clear and actionable to change and hopefully improve in the next release which will drive the uptick in engagement you set out to achieve.

Like everything in the process of making digital products, goal setting is an evolving, iterative process. Establishing norms around setting goals, measuring their effectiveness, and evolving them over time will ultimately drive growth.

Want help with your mobile app? The Rightpoint Digital Product team would love to learn more about the challenges your facing. Please reach out so we can set up a chat.