Types of Goals

When going on a long trip, the destination is known. The car is going to a location. Planes take off and land from specific airports. Maps help guide the route when walking or driving. Guides and review sites provide ideas for where to get food, find entertainment, and more.

In parallel, a business has some goal or objective. This goal is what the business defines as “success” and the entire organization needs to align in a way to move towards success.

Much like a trip, the business creates a set of measurable goals that can be used to help different people and teams coordinate to help reach the common goals. These can be focused on things like “increase our number of customers” or “improve experience” or “reduce costs”. Often these are gathered around an overall theme or grouped by a category.

For this book, we’ll use a popular framework called the Business Model Canvas. This framework is used by businesses of many sizes and in many industries as it helps bring a simplified but useful view of how a business operates.

For this, we’ll borrow three high-level concepts that are threaded through the BMC:

A successful business needs all of these to grow and prosper. But if a goal is attainable, it needs to be more than “be successful”. Even “make money” is a poor goal because there are so many ways to accomplish that broad objective. Good business leaders define strategy with specific goals that produce stable, long-term benefits rather than short-term boosts that are unsustainable.

Obviously, a business cannot exist if it cannot generate profit. But there are many ways to be profitable. Books on strategy obsess about how a business can structure itself to attract customers and outperform competitors.

In the end, there are two major categories for value creation: (a) producing things that customers want while (b) continuing to innovate in ways that open new markets or increase customer purchasing. Or, put another way (a) creating things people already want and (b) coming up with things they don’t realize they need, yet.

Customer-Focused Goals

People rarely just “know” what they need. We all know we need to eat, but we don’t know what to eat. We don’t know all of the options we have in terms of what food is available, how to cook it, what prepared foods exist, and so on. A business that sells food products must help their customers along a journey: help them understand their options, compare alternatives, decide on a plan, and then act on that plan.

The journey is a critical concept for most businesses. It helps people inside the business understand how a business and its products/services are seen from the outside. It also helps people inside the business provide customers with the right information, tools, or guidance appropriate to their place on their journey from understanding a need to making a purchase.

The journey doesn’t end with a purchase, though. After a purchase, there are additional steps the customer may take. Service and support help keep customers happy while they use the product. Later sales, trade-in offers, and similar approaches can lead to new sales or new customers (from referrals).

As may be clear, a technical manager has many opportunities to assist with business goals that support the customer journey. From the product itself (especially technical/software products) to support to mining feedback data for important customer sentiments or trends, the technical team can make a difference between a good company and a great one.

There’s no single algorithm describing the journey given the difference between markets, products, services, and more. But a few tend to be commonly found across most situations:

Customer Education

As product variety and/or product complexity grows, consumers seek information about their options. They typically start by educating themselves about the problems they face, then begin to evaluate solutions. Content marketing techniques, product review sites, and other tools all exist to address this need for information. Sample supporting technical goals might include:

Customer Acquisition:

For most businesses, new customers are needed to both sustain and grow the business. As old customers outgrow or move to alternatives, new customers are needed to replace those who move on to new competitors or alternatives. Then, especially for public companies, the business needs to get larger in order to continue competing against other businesses that are also pursuing similar goals. Technology teams can assist with this acquisition effort in several ways.

Customer Satisfaction:

Customers who are very happy with a product will recommend it to their friends. Customers who are just happy are far less likely to do the same. Ensuring that a customer is very happy is a very difficult job and technology can assist with this in several ways, building existing customer loyalty and helping to also improve customer acquisition rates. For example:

…And More Goals, Too!

These are three example categories. For a full overview of everything a business can track, a person would need an MBA and years of experience in that business.

The point here is that a technical manager needs to work closely with business teams who set the goals (and, often have MBAs and decades of experience).

By doing this, no matter how simple or complex the journey or how much growth the business demands, the technical manager can understand how their team directly contributes to the success of the goals in question.

Successful businesses know their customers. This is why they are able to grow. But successful businesses must also ensure they are able to operate effectively. They need to be structured so that as new products are demanded by the market, the business has the capabilities to develop, produce, deliver, and support these new products.

Operational excellence ensures that as customers ask for “more”, the business can provide it.

Efficiency and Productivity Goals

The first way “operational excellence” is perceived is through “quick results”. Efficient teams are typically productive teams. The teams are efficient because they are able to focus on what matters then act to ensure that work supports what is important. If the link to technology management isn’t clear yet, these examples might help:

Quality and Improvement Goals

Over time, teams might also realize a need to address “excellence” through quality and optimization efforts. This may be with an improved QA process, automation and tools, website/systems optimization techniques, or any other methods that help provide a faster, predictable experience to customers, like:

There’s a cliche: “cash feeds the kids”. A business that is growing but unprofitable is risky and is usually on track to be closed. Accountants and finance teams closely watch money coming in and out of the business, help set internal budgets that support the strategic goals, and ensure that individual managers are making spending decisions that line up with organizational priorities.

In general these profitability goals ask for ways the business can (a) increase prices, (b) increase total customer numbers, or (c) reduce costs. Each of these brings the potential for higher profits as more money comes in and/or the business keeps a greater share of each sale.

Thus:

Rarely are financial goals made explicit in a public fashion. Some industries (insurance/financials) might have goals like “4% profit on sales” that are very low but are also calculated in ways that can be legally and ethically manipulated through sales of other assets indirectly related to consumers.

Typically, most business financial goals are translated by executives into Value Creation or Operational Excellence goals first, to avoid local teams attempting to make decisions that can only be measured by the end-to-end results of the entire organization. Even the most important technology team can only influence business results. The best product in the world can be undermined by poor marketing, inefficient distribution, financial mismanagement, or any number of other “enterprise scale” matters.

Thus, Value and Operational goals are the best place for technical managers to look as they seek inspiration for creating their own goals that will support ongoing efforts in the business.