Setting Product Goals

Teresa Torres walks through how she sets quarterly product goals for her team, focusing on the most valuable thing the business needs next. She shows three quarters of goals that changed as her understanding grew: first growing registered users and tracking job seeker outcomes, then trying to change behavior across monthly active users, which she found too broad a group to move. Her Q2 shift to analyzing weekly sign-up cohorts gave clearer cause-and-effect insight and a measurable improvement. The essay matters because it shows goal-setting as an iterative learning process where the metric itself is often the thing that needs fixing.

01Key takeaways

• Start each goal-setting cycle by asking what would create the most value for the business right now.
• Avoid setting goals on broad aggregates like monthly active users, since they are slow and hard to move.
• Measure changes through narrow cohorts so you can see clear cause and effect from product changes.
• Treat missed goals as diagnostic: investigate why the assumptions failed before setting the next goal.
• Goals should evolve quarter to quarter as your understanding of the product and its users deepens.

02Key sections

Starting from business value

Each quarter Torres asks which accomplishment would create the most value for the business, and her goals shift as her understanding changes. She prioritized active users over raw registrations because activity drives business value.

Solving the outcome tracking problem

Measuring whether job seekers got hired was hard, but Torres treated it as non-optional because without it the product's effectiveness was unknown. Her team solved it and beat the target.

A Q1 goal that missed

The goal to move visitors into viewing jobs failed because Torres underestimated the number of entry points and visitor intents. She admits the team spent the quarter optimizing the wrong things.

Why MAU-based goals failed

Torres concluded that targeting behavior change in monthly active users is unrealistic: the group is too large, changes take time to propagate, and many entry points make the aggregate hard to move.

Shifting to cohort analytics

In Q2 the goal became improving analytics so product changes could be tied to outcomes, measured by weekly sign-up cohorts. A 2.5x improvement in new sign-ups viewing jobs appeared, and later the change spread to active users.

03From the post

“Each quarter, I set goals for my team. I start by asking, what's the most important thing we can accomplish this quarter that would create the most value for the business. Q3 will be my fourth quarter with my current company and once again our goals this coming quarter”

04Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.