The Importance of Non-Goals
I regularly get a lot of questions from product managers about which goals and objectives they should set for themselves and their teams. However, too frequently, I see people approach this question from the wrong angle: “what should I add onto our existing goals and objectives?”
A better question to ask is “what should we remove from our goals and objectives?”
Non-goals can provide far more clarity than goals; after all, the more goals you set, the less focused you and your teams become. Here’s a real world example of this principle in action.
Real-world example of non-goals for product groups
I recently ran a group coaching session for a GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) product group to help the team refresh their tenets as part of a reorg.
One key issue was that they wanted to be all things, causing lack of focus.
Some examples of conflicting guiding tenets that they wanted to establish:
The product roadmap should drive technical innovation to expand the frontiers of what’s possible in the industry, and it should focus on immediate tactical deployment of existing technology to make customers successful today
Solutions should scale across all customers, and they should also be customized for each customer
PMs should prescribe to customers the exact way on how to adopt their products, and PMs should let customers decide how to deploy their products
The product team should promote its ecosystem partners as a neutral curator, and the product team should also aggressively push its first party solutions at all times
Product interfaces should be easy-to-use for non-technical customers, and they should be highly customizable for technical customers
To be clear, it is possible to achieve conflicting goals in the long run (defined as “3-10 year time horizon”).
However, these tenets were meant to drive action in the short run (defined as “1-12 week time horizon”), and these conflicts therefore caused team paralysis and lack of cohesive identity.
The problem with additive goals
This product group was running in circles because they were trapped in solely considering “what should we add?”
Each person wanted to add their own perspective, and so the tenets stacked up high, with overlap across multiple tenets.
As a group, no one wanted to say “we shouldn’t add this proposed tenet,” because they didn’t want to sound like they were rejecting the validity of any person’s opinion, and they didn’t want to sound like they weren’t ambitious or driven.
To break this stalemate, I proposed using non-goals with the question, “Who do we not want to be?” For example, “we don’t want our customers to wait 18 months for a perfect solution when we could have delivered a great solution in 2 months.”
Suddenly, the conversation turned around.
Product managers proposed a new set of non-tenets that the group coalesced around and refined. From there, we were able to spin up a coherent set of 4 guiding tenets that were mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (MECE).
We broke the logjam because we created psychological safety for people to discuss what not to prioritize.
Since this GAFAM group coaching, we’ve deployed non-goals successfully with our clients, ranging from VPs of product to new grads. I’d like to share this knowledge with you as well, which is why I’m writing this two-part guide on non-goals for product leaders.
In this first part, we’ll define non-goals, discuss their benefits, and share examples. In the second part, we’ll break down how to implement non-goals across a variety of product scopes, ranging from product strategy to product execution.
The benefits of non-goals
A non-goal is an objective that product managers and product leaders deliberately choose not to pursue; to be clear, this means that the non-goal is not simply deprioritized, but instead has been fully dropped from further consideration.
Non-goals are valuable for both individuals and organizations, as they:
Provide focus and clarity
Free up resources
Align teams
Foster innovation
Let’s discuss each benefit below.
Non-goals provide focus and clarity
Product leadership requires us to make tough choices and set priorities.
When we define non-goals, we tighten up the “execution space” and therefore can focus on the highest-ROI initiatives to fund. That’s because the traditional method of “deprioritizing goals” tends not to work well, as these goals continue to take up considerable mental overhead.
For example, imagine that someone was asked to tackle a primary goal of “grow revenue” with a secondary conflicting goal of “grow profitability.”
This person would tend to move slower than the alternative: first focus solely on growing revenue with no worries about profits, then fully focus on profit optimization without worrying about exponential revenue growth.
You’ve seen this in your own personal life - any time you multitask, all tasks become slower.
If you try to clean up the living room while also preparing your dinner, you’ll need more time and effort than if you completed these tasks in sequence.
Therefore, removing a set of goals entirely from our decision-making processes can help drive progress towards critical mass as we sequentially knock out priorities.
Non-goals free up product resources
Resources are finite, and product managers must use them wisely. By identifying non-goals, we free up valuable time to maximize the chances that our highest-ROI initiatives will succeed, without burning precious time on non-urgent objectives.
As an example, say that one of your goals is to determine whether a new B2B product line will truly solve customer pain. What matters the most here is to clearly define your customer segment, identify their unsolved pain, and iteratively ship hypothesized solutions for that pain.
But, many times, PMs are charged with figuring out long-term pricing models, customer enablement collateral, and profitability forecasts while they’re trying to dive deep with their customers to discover what exactly to build.
These other tasks are crucial in the long run but are non-urgent in the short run; after all, we don’t even know whether this proposed new product line actually solves any customer pain.
By clearly setting a non-goal of “your goal is not to figure out long-term profitability because your only goal is to figure out whether we can build a solution that customers will value,” this PM is now empowered to ship more iterations than otherwise possible, and these additional iterations can make the entire difference between a winning product line and a failed one.
To be clear, IC product managers should look for non-goals to set for themselves and their teams, and managers of PMs should be looking for non-goals to set for their direct reports and their product groups as a whole.
Non-goals align product teams
Organizations must work together to achieve individual goals, group goals, and org goals. Therefore, by defining non-goals, leaders can ensure that everyone is aligned and working towards the same objectives. Non-goals eliminate confusion and reduce the risk of team members pursuing conflicting objectives.
Here’s an analogy: say that you and four other people founded a bakery. You have a small jar of fruit jam, and you’re trying to decide where to put this jam into your products.
You could put this jam into donuts, bagels, toast, wraps, sandwiches, yogurt, crackers, tea, and milk, but you only have this single jar of jam.
If your team of cofounders tried to put this limited jam into every product, none of them would taste good. We need to reduce the execution space.
We might decide as a group that our baked goods are excellent as-is, and set a non-goal of “putting jam into baked goods.”
Therefore, we would put the jam into tea to create fruit tea and into milk to create fruit milk. As a team, we’ve now ensured quality on our existing baked goods while also unlocking innovation in our beverages.
In this analogy, the jar of jam is your product development resources: engineers, designers, QA analysts, data analysts, user researchers, and product managers.
You simply cannot go get more by waving some magic wand; you must work with the bandwidth that you currently have.
Non-goals provide clear guardrails on what the organization will not pursue, eliminating ambiguity and confusion. As an added bonus, many times when you crystallize “here’s what we’re not going to do,” teams will gain sudden clarity into what their core focus should be.
Non-goals foster product innovation
Innovation requires experimentation and risk-taking. By defining non-goals, leaders can encourage their teams to explore new ideas and take calculated risks. That is, non-goals give teams the freedom to experiment without fearing failure, as failure is explicitly expected and encouraged.
An example of a non-goal for a team that is in active product discovery: “Your job is not to increase revenue from existing products this quarter. Your goal is to ship at least 4 experiments with the expectation that all 4 of them will fail.”
By doing so, teams are clear on the fact that their focus should not be on minor incremental metric optimization that fails to establish long-term differentiation. They understand that their focus should be on uncovering deep, unsolved pain for their customers to unlock a step-level jump that permanently alters the trajectory of the business.
When non-goals are in place, if a team doesn’t achieve the non-goal, then they don’t get punished for it, which then creates a culture of psychological safety as well as aligned prioritization.
While this phenomenon might sound obvious or trivial, you’d be surprised by the number of times I’ve seen teams get punished for not achieving a “secondary priority” or a “lower priority” even though they clearly achieved their “first priority.”
Punishing teams in this way is a failure of leadership: if teams are to be punished for failing a secondary priority, then the secondary priority should have been the primary priority instead.
Instead of setting teams up to fail by creating a maze of 2nd, 3rd, and 4th priorities, give them a singular focus and set all of the other priorities as “non-goals” instead.
Closing thoughts
The time spent on establishing non-goals can provide incredibly high ROI for both IC product managers as well as managers of PMs. Yet, few product teams have added non-goals to their toolkits, instead relying solely on OKRs (objectives and key results) and on additive goal-setting.
Setting non-goals in a subtractive manner can be incredibly powerful, but incorrect implementation can cause problems too. In the second half of this guide, we will cover how to implement non-goals successfully.
Thank you to Pauli Bielewicz, Mary Paschentis, Goutham Budati, Markus Seebauer, Juliet Chuang, and Kendra Ritterhern for making this guide possible.
