The Mindful Manager

When the end of the fiscal year approaches it means it’s time to create goals for the next year. At a large company, this can be challenging, as often the corporate goals are sometimes very high-level.

Frequently, I’ve seen people get very cynical about high-level company goals. Or worse yet, software developers who think the company goals have nothing to do with them personally. That’s simply not true. Everyone in the company needs to support the company goals. The work each employee does impacts those goals whether they realize it or not.

Let’s look at an example. If a company has a goal to increase revenue by 30% , how do I, as the manager, translate that into something meaningful for my development teams? I definitely want to support increasing revenue, after all, I want my company to be successful. I want my teams to be aware of this goal for the company and that what they do impacts that goal.

Let’s assume I have a software development team working on a new release of an enterprise software product. The new release will be out in spring. The question to ask is: How will this product release contribute to increasing revenue?

If the release is high-quality, customers will be happy. If it is of low quality, customers will complain and that information could impact sales to other customers. And, if the changes the team makes to the user experience truly are easy-to-use and intuitive versus not so easy to use and not intuitive, that will also impact customers and sales.

So in this example I am going to create goals for my team supporting the revenue goal using these two requirements: high-quality and easy-to-use intuitive software. The goals could be written as:

1. Release the software with no priority 1, 2, or 3 defects. This will be measured by the number of open defects.
2. The user interface is intuitive and easy to use. Measured by the feedback from usability studies and comparison with prior testing.

Both of these team goals support the 30% increase in revenue goal. The next step is to translate these product goals into individual contributor goals:

1. For each software development team member assigned to the April release, they will write unit tests and fix all p1, p2, p3 defects found by QA/QE.
2. The software development team is required to work closely with the user experience team to create a user interface that is intuitive and easy-to-use and to support user testing needs.

By tying an individual developer’s goals into the company goals, everyone understands how they as well as their  team contribute to the company goals. This not only makes those goals meaningful and achievable, it makes the goals understandable and doable by the team members.