Condorsay's goal-setting philosophy
Goals help us understand if we're headed in the right direction
In this edition, I write about how we think about goals, how our goals have shifted over three months, and link to a Condorsay template to help your team decide on how to set them.
My cofounder Dan likes to summarize Steve Blank’s definition of a startup as “a company in search of a business model,” and I think this is an especially succinct way of framing the task. Given some combination of experience, talent, grit, intuition, and luck, the job of a founding team is to explore the universe in search of unsolved problems, discover people to whom they can deliver unique and high value, and learn to deliver it to them in a way that converts into return for shareholders.
Achieving this is called “product-market fit,” and is the closest thing that capitalism offers to enlightenment. In fact, I’d argue that the search for enlightenment and product-market fit share a common set of characteristics:
Amorphous, ill-defined things that promise happiness and abundance for those who find them. Different definitions depending on who you ask.
Long, windy paths that often double back on themselves. Hard to navigate and easy to get lost.
Lots of available (and often conflicting) advice from people who have been there before. More books than you could read in a lifetime.
This is a particularly helpful metaphor in my view because it frames the act of building a startup as primarily an exercise in discovering the true nature of reality.
The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. - Thomas Huxley
We start our journeys with beautiful hypotheses — what if we did *this,* but for *that?* — if only *this,* then *that* would be much easier — and are often rewarded with a stern reminder from the universe of our astounding ignorance. Taking a swing or two, we understand that the world doesn’t work quite exactly as we thought it did, and move to reformulate our plans to reflect what we learned in the process. The goal, of course, is to do this enough times that we start to understand people and their problems in great enough detail to ship a solution that just clicks.
This can take quite a long time and, as the second characteristic above portends, it’s important to have a way to stay grounded and focused even in the most frustrating and confusing times in the same way that any savvy explorer would never leave home without a compass. This is how I view setting good goals: as a compass to help you navigate the long path from ignorance to product-market fit (or enlightenment).
Good goals should help point you in the direction of enlightenment
Setting good goals is important for three reasons:
Drive alignment on what’s important: We are not on this journey alone, and learning to align with your team on a common direction is vital to ensure you’re rowing in the same direction. Aligning on concrete, actionable, well-communicated goals reduces the chance for misunderstanding or discord and ensures you’re working on the most important things to achieve them.
Measure and communicate progress: Once a team has aligned on what’s important, accepting accountability for measuring progress ensures that all stakeholders understand how things are going.
Helps you understand when you need to change course: Because we start from a position of ignorance, the most likely outcome is that we either fail to achieve our goals, or achieve them and realize they were the wrong goals altogether. Goals are ultimately hypotheses, and reacting to ugly facts is key to reorienting in the direction of enlightenment.
I recently built a template in Condorsay intended to help teams on the goal-setting journey by aligning on the tough tradeoffs. Key tensions like growth and retention, strategy and execution, and research and intuition often go unaddressed by fast-moving founders, resulting in a scattered, unfocused approach that doesn’t achieve very much. I hope this template and others like it can help inspire teams to have these conversations earlier, and set focused, ruthless goals that efficiently reveal the most important truths.
To that end, here’s a short summary of our goals process so far:
V1: Solve five problems for real people (achieved ✅): Through 1:1 engagement with friends/family, we were able to solve real problems (like helping decide where to move, delay a feature, and get medical care for a pet), but the product had a huge learning curve, so we needed to loosen the reins a little and allow the product to stand on its own feet, so we introduced v2
V2: Fifty independent decisions (achieved ✅): In the course of achieving this goal, we realized that most people were using our tools to make decisions for themselves and/or their partners, and needed a deeper understanding of how people might use them to drive discussions with their teams, so we introduced v3 to start diving in headfirst
V3: Shadow five decision-enabled meetings (not yet achieved 💬): Gaining trust to shadow team meetings is tough, and we haven’t been able to do this yet. We introduced v4 to keep moving even as we keep v3 alive in the background.
V4: Ten decisions with three or more respondents (not yet achieved, 40% to goal 💬): This is the goal of our current sprint, which has been pretty great so far. We’ve learned a lot, gotten at least one potential case study, and hope to accelerate as we continue to form our product.
I hope this was useful context on how we think about goals! Please let me know if you have any thoughts/questions/feedback — would love to hear if our goals template is useful!
Finally, Stripe introduced payment links last week, and we thought we’d give them a shot. If you believe our product is providing value and want to support our work, please visit this link and chip in whatever you think is fair.
Have a great Memorial Day weekend!
James