How we work · 3 min read
How we set goals
A few real goals over a long list: outcomes over output, revisited often, kept lightweight on purpose.
Most goal-setting is ritual for its own sake: quarterly ceremonies, cascading spreadsheets, a scoring meeting that produces more anxiety than direction. We don't do that. We're small, and small teams have an advantage here that bigger ones would kill for: everyone can hold the whole picture in their head. Our job isn't to build machinery that keeps a hundred people pointed the same way. It's to pick a few things that matter and stay honest about whether they're working.
A few goals, not a list
We'd rather have three goals we actually mean than fifteen we recite. A long list isn't ambition, it's avoidance: it lets everything feel important so nothing has to be chosen. Choosing is the point.
At any given time we're carrying a handful of real goals, the kind you could say out loud in one breath. If we can't name them without reading off a document, we have too many. When something new looks urgent enough to add, the question is what it replaces, not where it fits.
Outcomes, not output
A goal is something that changes in the world, not a pile of work we did. "Ship five features" is output. "A new user can get to their first real result without asking us for help" is an outcome, and it's a much better goal, because you can hit the first one and still have built the wrong thing.
Output is easy to measure and easy to fake. Outcomes are harder to pin down and worth the trouble anyway. We tie goals to what a user can now do, what got faster, what stopped breaking. The work is how we get there, not the thing we're grading.
A goal you can't tell you missed isn't a goal
If there's no honest way to know whether we hit it, it's a wish. Write goals so that in a few months you could say plainly: yes, no, or here's what we learned instead.
We revisit, we don't ceremonialize
Goals meet reality and reality usually wins. A goal that made sense in the spring can be quietly irrelevant by summer, and pretending otherwise just to protect the plan is how teams march confidently in the wrong direction.
We revisit goals often and lightly. Not a heavyweight quarterly review with scores and a slide deck, just a regular, honest look: is this still the thing? Is it moving? If a goal is dead, we say so and drop it without ceremony. Changing your mind in public when the facts change is a strength, and it connects straight to how decisions get made and unmade here.
Dropping a goal isn't failure. Failure is dragging a dead goal through three more months to avoid saying it's dead.
Goals connect to the direction
None of this floats free. Our goals are the near-term expression of where we're going: the long arc broken into pieces small enough to actually pursue this month. If a goal doesn't ladder up to that direction, it's either a distraction or a sign the direction needs updating. Both are worth catching early.
That link runs both ways. The direction tells us which goals are worth setting; the goals, hit or missed, tell us whether the direction still holds. When enough goals point somewhere the stated direction doesn't, we change the direction, not the reality.
Why we keep it this light
We keep goal-setting deliberately lightweight, and that's a choice, not a gap we'll fill once we're "mature." Heavy process here would buy us coordination we don't need at this size and cost us the thing we most rely on: the ability to change course fast when we learn something. Small batches and short cycles run through how we work for the same reason.
When we grow to the point where a few shared goals in everyone's head stops being enough, we'll add exactly as much structure as the problem earns, and not a page more. Until then, a few real goals, honestly revisited, is the whole system.