Product objectives: how to define yours successfully

Product objectives help you keep your team accountable, prioritize your team’s projects effectively, and identify when and how you need to pivot. 

To help you set any product objective successfully, we’ll review best practices for crafting them and highlight the objectives that several leading software companies use. 

But first, let’s align on the definition of a product objective as well as why they’re important.

What is a product objective?

It’s a qualitative or quantitative goal that your team sets for your product. The goal can include product-specific or business outcomes and it can apply to your product as a whole or to a specific area (e.g., a new feature).

Related: What is a product experience strategy?

Benefits of product objectives

Here’s why your product initiatives should have objectives attached to them:

• Optimizes developer resources: Your developers have limited bandwidth and need to be allocated towards the most impactful projects. Product objectives can help by revealing the projects that can deliver the highest return for the business

• Provides the foundation for planning: By understanding the north star product goal, your team can begin crafting concrete activities and timelines for reaching it

• Enables easy tracking: Your team can consistently track the progress towards the objective and, based on how things are going, either pivot or double down

• Drives cross-functional alignment: By helping all the relevant teams understand what the end goal is, they can work together effectively to reach it

• ‍Empowers you to stay focused on certain projects: As you receive product asks, your team can more easily say no or deprioritize them based on the current objectives you’re trying to achieve

Examples of product objectives

To better understand how your product objectives can look, let’s review a few that leaders at widely-known companies have adopted.

Linear enforces a zero-bugs policy

Linear, a modern tool for product management, doesn’t want a single bug to linger in their product. At the same time, they don’t want their engineers to consistently get pulled from their core projects to resolve bugs.

This led their team to set a “zero-bugs policy” for their product and enforce the policy in a way that prevents context switching for their engineers at large.

More specifically, they assign a weekly “goalie” who’s tasked with fixing the bugs that get triaged throughout that week. 

Here’s more from Cristina Cordova, the COO at Linear:

Related: 10 impactful AI product ideas

Drata has several objectives to improve their UX

Drata, a compliance automation platform that helps companies become audit ready, quickly, has defined several objectives.

Here are few according to Jason Hatchett, a Senior PM at Drata:

• Offer invaluable product integrations: To help them continually refine their integration offerings, their team tracks how quickly and how many customers adopt a given product integration. At the same time, they track how many customers disconnect a certain integration and the speed at which they do so

• Automate as much as possible in the platform: This helps users spend little time looking for information and realize a fast time to value

• Provide highly-accessible content on using their platform: They strive to make the content around using their platform—either via their trust center or self-help guides—easy to follow, even if the reader doesn’t have first-hand experience with their platform

That said, they also take a more holistic approach to measuring product success by tying it to their company’s ultimate goal. 

According to Jason:

https://www.merge.dev/blog/product-profiles-jason-hatchett?blog-related=image

Gong wants sellers to love their platform

From day 1, Gong, the leading revenue intelligence platform, established and continues to prioritize a holistic and qualitative product objective: Make their platform irresistible to sellers.

This objective influences critical product decisions, such as the features they decide to prioritize as well as personnel decisions, such as the post sales teams they decide to staff.

Gong’s CPO and co-founder, Eilon Reshef, shares more on how they landed on this product objective since Gong's inception:

How to set product objectives successfully

Here are some best practices to help you establish effective product objectives.

Use the SMART framework 

Using the SMART framework (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound), you can better define your goals, prioritize them, and measure and track them. 

For example, say you’re launching a suite of integrations to your product. Using SMART, your product objective can be something like “Get 25% of our enterprise customers to adopt one of our new product integrations within 3 months.”

This is specific, as it references customer adoption for new product integrations; it’s measurable, as you’re aiming to get 25% adoption from enterprise customers; it’s achievable (assuming you’ve seen similar adoption from previous integrations); and it’s time-bound, as the goal is to do this within 3 months. 

Related: Best practices for implementing a product roadmap

Leverage customer and prospect data to inform your objectives

Your team can pull together reports on not only the top product requests and issues but also the customers and prospects that are making these requests and/or are affected by them. 

You can then pull the annual recurring revenue associated with these customers and open opportunities to better understand whether it’s worth converting specific product feedback into an objective.

Get input from go-to-market teams

While executives may be the only ones who need to sign off on your product objectives, go-to-market teams, like customer success and sales, can weigh in on the product objectives that will have the biggest impact on the business—at least from their perspective. 

To get their feedback, you can survey them on your objectives, present it to them during a meeting and ask for live feedback, poll them on the objectives they think are are most relevant via a platform like Slack, etc. 

Embrace flexible product objectives

Even after you’ve set your product objectives, shifting market trends or new customer insights should push you to replace the existing objectives, modify them, or focus on other existing ones.

Jason Hatchett and his team at Drata have fully embraced this approach:

Revisit your product objectives frequently

The rate at which your market evolves and your customers’ and prospects’ needs shift will dictate how often you need to review and potentially adjust your product objectives.

For smaller companies in fast-growing markets, this can be as often as every month; while larger companies in more mature markets can review them as infrequently as once per year.

Meet your integration objectives with Merge

Merge, the leading unified API solution, lets you add hundreds of cross-category product integrations through a single, aggregated API.

Merge also provides Integration Observability features to help your customer success team manage the integrations themselves, and we fully maintain the integrations on your engineers’ behalf.

Learn why leading B2B software companies—including BILL, Ramp, AngelList, and Navan—trust us to power their integrations by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts.

Product objectives FAQ

In case you have any more questions on product objectives, we’ve addressed several more frequently-asked questions below:

What is the difference between a product objective and a product vision?

A product objective is tied to a certain outcome while a product vision is focused on the  future experience and value your product can provide.

What is the difference between a product objective and a business objective?

A product objective can support a business objective, but it can also support non-business goals, such as getting a higher rate of customers to complete a key task in your platform.

Which teams are typically involved in setting product objectives?

While it depends on the objective, the product team often collaborates on goals with engineers, leaders in sales, marketing and customer success, and the C-suite.

What are some common product objective key performance indicators (KPIs)?

The best KPIs to use will depend on the type of product you offer and the specific areas you want to measure, but here are a few common KPIs:

• Active user growth: The daily, weekly, and/or monthly active user growth your product experiences

• User expansion: How much users in a new market (e.g., a target region) adopt your product

• Share of market: How much market share your product has gained (or lost) 

• Product usage: The extent to which overall product (or feature) adoption has increased or decreased

• Workflow completions: The rate at which customers complete a key workflow in your product

• Product reliability: How many tickets get filed for product issues over time

• Time to market: How quickly your product gets pushed live

• Time spent on a task or workflow: How quickly users can finish a specific activity or process

• Ease of use: The extent to which users can use your product independently 

• ‍Customer satisfaction: How happy (or unhappy) users are with your product (e.g., the NPS® score on your product)