Good goal-setting is essential across many disciplines in business, and research is no exception. In my experience, the best researchers have spent time at the start of each half carefully crafting goals to align against in the upcoming months. Here are the three main benefits to setting goals:
Goals help to focus your attention where it’s most needed or valued.
Long-term impact is just as important as immediate-term impact (here’s my post explaining why), so you need to give yourself time to think ahead and commit to effective longer-term priorities. Without committed goals, it’s too easy to get distracted and thrown around by less important requests that arrive at your desk each day. Goals help you to plan your time thoughtfully and reduce the risk that you overcommit to individual priorities.
Goals give you a yardstick for tracking and measuring progress.
Without a goal to work toward, it’s often difficult to realize how far you’ve come in hindsight. When you set yourself ambitious targets, it’s easy to notice when you’re making progress toward them, and it’s also easy to see which of your efforts are helping most and which are helping least in achieving that well-defined progress.
You can share your goals and plans with collaborators so they can better understand, sync with, and support your anticipated priorities.
When partners and colleagues see where you expect to spend your time and energy through the year, they can plan accordingly. Unexpected collaborations can also arise through someone finding important overlap between what you and they are planning for the next few months.
What types of goals can a researcher set?
There’s no simple formula for which goals are more important than others. I’ve worked with orgs who separate product development goals as a necessary cross-functional exercise while leaving personal goals as an optional add-on. I’ve worked with orgs who group these types of goals together. And I’ve worked with other orgs who present company-level goals and give each employee the flexibility to derive their own goals without much oversight.
However, there are two primary categories of goal that are common across the systems for researchers. Those are research goals and growth goals:
Research goals: This is the research you expect to do, and it covers everything from your immediate product team needs to more exploratory or strategic priorities. You generally want to organize your bandwidth so that your product teams have all the urgent research support they need but you also leave space for other exciting creative or strategic priorities.
Growth goals: This is all about setting yourself up for greater efficiency and success going forward. You might want to improve particular skills, strengthen specific partnerships, learn more about how another function at your company works, or improve a non-research process that you think contains too much friction. The best growth goals boil down to investing in yourself, investing in your colleagues, or investing in your company. Of course, when you’re on company time, you just need to make sure there’s a strong argument for how your growth goals translate into real returns for your business teams.
Going one step further, many people like to balance their performance goals or priorities across three categories:
People (e.g. healthy relationships, stronger cross-functional networks)
Process (e.g. smooth operations, efficient pipelines)
Product (e.g. good user experiences, popular new features).
If you want to use this framework, these three Ps could fall under either research or growth depending on the scope of the goal itself.
What does a good goal look like?
Regardless of what type of goal you’re setting, here are a few rules that help to ensure your goal-setting is effective.
Rule 1: Set SMART goals
Many of you are probably well-acquainted with SMART, so I won’t go into huge detail here. To summarize briefly, you should try to make sure your goals are:
Specific: Be concrete and focused rather than general or ambiguous
Measurable: Set quantifiable targets or milestones that allow you to track progress
Achievable: Be realistic in setting targets that can be met
Relevant: Clearly align your goals with broader org objectives or priorities
Time-Bound: Set appropriate timelines and expectations
Rule 2: Ruthlessly ask “why?” and target impact
Whenever possible, it’s best to goal on outcomes not activities. A goal to “increase user retention” is better than a goal to “run a survey” because it’s clear what you’re trying to achieve and why. It’s not always possible for researchers to do this because so much is outside their control in product development and some research is exploratory, but it’s always productive to go into goal-setting activities with an outcome-focused mindset. You may be surprised at just how many of your goals can be quantified by real metrics.
During one of my past roles, I set myself a goal to “improve the team’s understanding of what makes a memory training game effective”. When I asked myself why that was important, it was clear that it related to improving a specific mobile game’s educational potential. So I adjusted my goal to “develop a new game mechanic that improves user memory performance by X%”. This pushed me to develop simple prototype game mechanics derived from an original game and then test those with research participants to see which designs maximized recall.
There are so many other examples of this from my own experiences. In another role, a goal to “publish two scientific papers” became “improve the company’s scientific credibility” which then became “launch a partnership product with a major health organization”. The last goal linked into a major strategic priority for the company, so its importance was self-explanatory. On the other hand, it wasn’t clear that “publishing scientific papers” or “improving scientific credibility” would actually benefit the company in any tangible way—they were simply activities that some stakeholders considered important for securing the much-needed health partnership. As a result of having a more direct impact-focused goal, the research team identified more effective ways of getting to a deal with a health partner without publications, which may not have happened if the goal was to publish papers.
In other words, feel free to join what I call the “toddler school of goal-setting”. Anyone with a toddler knows how annoying they are when they repeatedly ask “why?” to basic instructions. In this case, annoying yourself by repeatedly asking “why?” is productive. Every time you set a new goal, ask “why is this goal important?”. If there’s an answer that moves the goalpost, go ahead and make the new goalpost your goal. And if the goalposts no longer move because the goal clearly sells itself, you probably have a winner.
Rule 3: Find the right balance between low-level and high-level
Goals that are too high-level become excessively general and violate the first rule of SMART: be specific. On the other hand, goals that are too low-level become inflexible and often quickly outdated as the details around team plans or priorities change during the course of a half. Examples:
Too high-level: “Help the team develop a new user onboarding experience”
It’s not clear what you need to do to succeed or achieve impact here.
Too low-level: “Run user interviews to inform the team about why Gen X users drop off during onboarding”
If the team decides in two weeks that Gen X is no longer the priority group for their onboarding flow, or that interviews won’t give them the insights they need, or that they’re more interested in where rather than why users drop out of onboarding, your goal becomes irrelevant.
Better: “Deliver research-based recommendations for user onboarding designs that reduce churn”
This doesn’t make too many assumptions about a team’s focus (only that they want to improve onboarding retention, perhaps based on a broader org priority), and it focuses on delivering measurable impact (i.e. did your research recommendations inform a better onboarding design?). It also gives you the flexibility to choose research methods as needed, and it may allow you to quantify “reduce churn” by referring to broader team targets.
Rule 4: Be ambitious
It’s better to set goals too high than too low since you want to push yourself to achieve as much as possible (as long as you’re still staying true to the “achievable” part of SMART). You may have come across the phrase “stretch goals”, referring to goals that are designed to be met at around 50% or 75% rather than 100%. If you get halfway toward meeting an incredibly ambitious goal, you can consider that a success. So if you think you can meet a 7% improvement target, it’s better to set your goal at 10% rather than 5%, since it’s more important to look for creative ways to go beyond 7% than it is to say you crushed your 5% goal by achieving 7%. Just be clear upfront with stakeholders when you’re setting yourself stretch goals so everyone is on the same page.
Rule 5: Be flexible
You can maximize flexibility in your goals by finding the right balance of high-level vs low-level in the language you use (see Rule 3 above). But in the end, no matter how good your goals are, there’s always a chance that they become useless midway through a half. When that happens, you should be willing to shift your goals and priorities as needed and document how circumstances changed and why you adapted to better support the team. There’s no point in continuing to meet goals that are no longer beneficial to your teams or the business.
“Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.”
~ Albert Einstein
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