During the first few weeks of our productive work at Mavrix, we did not set any goals for ourselves. This was simply because the work we were doing was very different from anything anyone of us had done before. There was no baseline information on effort, productivity, duration, etc. for this kind of work available in the public domain either. After a few weeks, we sat together as a team to talk about what a reasonable goal might be. Note that I used the singular “goal” – we decided to keep it simple and stick to one metric that we considered most important – productivity. This is what happened next:

1. Started with comfortable goal. There was a sense of discomfort all around when we started discussing goals. People did not want to get stuck with a goal that they could not deliver to. Although it seemed low, we agreed on a goal that everyone was “comfortable” with.
2. Gathered data. A week after setting our “comfortable” goal, we beat it by a huge margin. We decided to measure ourselves for another week before deciding if our goal needed revision.
3. Determined periodicity of the goal. We were surprised the next week, when we missed the “comfortable” goal. After some analysis, we concluded that given our work structure, we needed a two-week time period to measure ourselves against the goal, not a week.
4. Review goal at team or individual level? When I proposed sharing each individual’s measurements against the goal, I was surprised when everyone pushed back. They said they’d rather look at the goal at the team level because individual goal discussions could put people on the defensive instead of motivating them. Some of them told me that in their experience, reviewing goals at the individual level resulted in people “gaming” numbers or doing shoddy work in order to meet goals.
5. Baselined goal. After 6 weeks of measuring ourselves, we reset the goal to a value that was much higher than our initial one but also lower than the best we did in a given period. This is the goal we are measuring ourselves against now.
6. Adjusted business plan. Our measurements showed that the productivity assumption I made in the business plan was not valid (Surprise! Surprise!). While we have adjusted the plan to reflect our current productivity number (same launch date, smaller launch), we are committed to finding ways to get faster and better. If we can change the business plan once, we can change it again.