Goal Setting for Engineering Teams: A Practical Guide
A structured program based on a mock interview with an engineering manager at Robinhood, focusing on effective goal-setting strategies for engineering teams. This program incorporates behavioral aspects, habit formation, and addresses potential psychological barriers.
Program Modules
Understanding Goal Setting Inputs
Identify key sources of information for effective goal setting, considering company-wide initiatives, customer needs, and team capacity. This activity emphasizes the importance of diverse perspectives and data-driven decision-making in goal setting.
Gather Input from Senior Leadership
YearlyUnderstand company-wide initiatives and strategic priorities. Align team goals with overall organizational objectives.
“Maybe there are initiatives that the company wants to drive or the organization wants to drive taking that as an input”
Gather Input from Team Customers
QuarterlyIdentify customer needs and challenges through surveys or feedback sessions. Prioritize goals that directly address customer pain points and enhance satisfaction.
“taking an input from your team's customers... getting a sense of what they want, what they're looking for, what are the challenges that they're facing taking that as an input”
Gather Input from Your Team
MonthlyConduct surveys and brainstorming sessions to understand team's capacity, priorities, and concerns. Actively solicit feedback from your team members to ensure buy-in and engagement.
“and then the third input I would say is from your team...their ears are on the ground they have a good understanding of you know where the skeletons are hidden in the closet”
Prioritization and Planning
Prioritize collected inputs and develop a roadmap or OKRs, considering project complexity, team capacity, and potential cognitive biases like the planning fallacy. Develop strategies to mitigate these biases and ensure realistic planning.
Stack Rank Priorities
QuarterlyPrioritize tasks based on data, intuition, and team input. Utilize a prioritization matrix to systematically rank tasks based on impact and effort.
“we put all of these data together in one single spreadsheet and then try to stack rank the priorities based on our intuition our judgment and the data that we've gathered”
Estimate Project Size and Capacity
QuarterlyAssess project complexity and team capacity to create a realistic roadmap. Incorporate techniques for mitigating the planning fallacy and overconfidence bias in estimations.
“we can estimate the size of those projects by asking the team by asking the engineers who are closest to the problem but there's also a lot of uncertainty with estimation”
Define OKRs or Roadmap
QuarterlyFormalize goals and plans using OKRs or a project roadmap. Ensure that goals are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound).
“depending on the company some companies follow an okr format um so we try to use objectives and key results sometimes follow a roadmap format”
What You'll Accomplish
- Learn how to gather effective inputs for team goal setting.
- Understand different prioritization frameworks for engineering projects.
- Develop a plan for creating and managing team OKRs or roadmaps.
- Learn strategies for motivating engineers, especially when dealing with technical debt.
- Understand and mitigate cognitive biases in goal setting.
- Incorporate principles of habit formation into goal setting.
- Develop strategies for managing psychological barriers to goal setting.
- Understand the social psychology of goal setting within teams.
- Apply behavioral economic principles to goal setting and decision making.
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