What - Moving from purpose to goals

Metrics make the Manager

After defining your purpose, the next step to the manager becoming a scaling product is to define what we are doing. To do this:

The manager has a specific goal, ideally a metric or set of metrics to target, and they are laser focused on executing against that goal.

While answering why allows you to communicate to key decision makers your purpose and impact, answering what achieves two things:

1. It creates trust with key decision makers that you know what to do to execute against your core purpose.

2. It creates focus and motivation for your team, since you not only define what you after doing now, but also what you are not doing.

What you are doing will change over time, so making sure everyone understands what the focus is now is critical.

The most effective way to define what is through a metric. This is because the articulation must be grounded, and short-term progress needs to be observed in order to guarantee we are moving towards the goal. In addition, this allows you to be flexible on how to execute, while being extremely clear on what you are trying to achieve.

Defining a Good Metric

Given the importance of creating a metric that has meaning, what makes a good metric? The following criteria needs to be met:

1. The metric is simple. It is better to have an intuitive metric that imperfectly measures the nuances of what you want to do, than have a hard to explain metric that tries to incorporate all the subtleties of the business. This also makes it easy to see that the metric (and thus the initiatives) maps to your core purpose convincingly.

2. The metric is movable by your team. Notably, this doesn’t mean that the metric needs to only be movable by your team, but your team’s contribution should be observable, so that it can create a feedback loop.

3. The metric has a clearly defined “good enough” state. After you reach this state, you should define a new goal for the team, since the current goal will have diminishing returns.