GUIDE 2024

5 Product Manager Goals to Ship Great Products

A product manager’s role is a crucial position in every company that provides products and services. Product management ensures that the final customer gets the best versions of the products at hand. To optimize production, some product manager goals help PMs manage their duties more effectively.

When we talk about product manager goals, it’s not necessarily performance goals or quarterly goals for that matter. The entire process of setting goals encompasses everything from product goals and organization goals to individual goals.

Looking at the typical product roadmap, product manager goals can vary depending on where you are on the roadmap and product lifecycle. However, there are a few PM goals that should be a template for product managers all around.

In this article, we’ll go over those common product manager goals that can be used to deliver a successful product to the masses.

Let’s dive right in.

How Do You Set Product Manager Goals?

When setting any sort of organizational or PM goals, you need to keep SMART goals in mind. Regardless of whether they are new product goals, business goals, team goals, or any other form of goals.

SMART goals are a framework for setting realistic goals that can be achieved using existing resources and plans. Here’s a summary of how it works:

  • Specific – is about choosing extremely specific goals that only target a single element. For example, rather than a general ROI goal, it should be an ROI per ad spend, marketing spends, or CSR expense.
  • Measurable – means that every goal should be easily quantifiable. If you’re setting a goal, you need to be able to set a metric or tangible value to it so that you can measure your progress to determine if you’re getting closer to achieving said goal.
  • Actionable – means that all the goals you set should be possible. In other words, you should be able to take action on them with the resources you have.
  • Relevant – is mainly about the goals being related to what matters such as the product, company objectives, and individual career paths. For example, you can’t have a goal for any amount of sales in product management.
  • Time-Bound – means that all product manager goals should have a timeline attached to them to create a sense of urgency. For example, choosing a product owner for a new product is an extremely time-bound goal because you need to get one as soon as possible.

Using this methodology, there are a few product manager goals that all PMs should have in mind. The key results of these goals will differ according to different industries and organizations, however, that difference will only be in numbers.

5 Product Manager Goals to Push Out Great Products

Product managers use retrospectives to identify what’s good, bad, and how to iterate toward making better products. However, getting those retrospectives can be a challenge if your goals aren’t refined.

The following are some product manager goals you can use to achieve that:

1.     Improve Overall Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is crucial to the success of any product or service and it mostly depends on how well a PM understands that. Setting customer satisfaction goals ensures that your product is on the right track. If you’re not reaching those goals, it’s clear that the product needs new features, changes, or a complete overhaul.

Therefore, setting customer satisfaction-based goals are a great start to ensuring a great final product. Here are some examples:

  • Reduce the overall number of customer complaints, support issues, and refunds by 30% in the next 6 months.
  • Conduct and evaluate 10 customer interviews where the customer contributed to the churn rate.
  • Get around 500 new customer reviews across various channels and websites.
  • Design and conduct 30 customer interviews to get direct customer feedback.
  • Improve the Net Promoter Score (NPS) average by 2 points.

Ensuring customer satisfaction is one of the most important PM goals.

2.     Minimize Feedback Submission Barriers

Product feedback is essential to ensure that the final product is good. That’s why it’s important to have a system of getting product feedback from users and even employees in some cases. Here are a few sample goals for it:

  • Increase user feedback submissions by 20% using online forms, pop-up reviews, and more.
  • Launch a dedicated community feedback page or site by the end of 2024, where users can actively review products, provide feedback, and give recommendations.
  • Schedule monthly meetings to discuss ideas and work on prioritization.
  • Set one on one meetings with employees and stakeholders to get their feedback.

Leveraging feedback is the easiest way of nailing your product’s user experience.

3.     Set Onboarding Goals

Onboarding new people to your product is crucial because it can determine whether the user wants to continue using your product or not. That’s why it’s important to have onboarding-related PM goals, such as:

  • Increase the new user activation rate by 15% during Q3.
  • Improve sign-up conversion rate by 20% in Q4.
  • Improve onboarding completion rate by 25% using better user stories.

Proper onboarding always tends to maximize sales numbers.

4.     Criteria for Staying Active

It’s hard to determine active product users and that’s why you need clear criteria. Understanding activation criteria will help check how the product is doing. Here are a few PM goals related to it:

  • Find out what customers do during onboarding and beyond.
  • Examine 25 users who were retained.
  • Increase user retention in people spending 1 minute or more on the website.

Getting users more active should be part of every product strategy.

5.     Build Better Products

While creating better products seems obvious, it’s still important to keep it as a product manager goal. Here are a few goals for it:

  • Increase average rating by revamping the product development method.
  • Conduct three soft launches before the official product launch.
  • Try three different pricing models to determine what works best for the product.
  • Get 1,000 additional reviews on the App Store and Play Store.
  • Improve the product’s NPS from 6 to 8 in six months.

These can also be called project management goals because to achieve each of these goals an organization would launch a separate project.

Bottom Line

Regardless of whether you’re working in a startup or a multinational organization, your final goal as a product manager should be to create and deliver the best product in your niche.

However, there needs to be a proper product roadmap to reach that point. Each part of the roadmap is filled with milestones, achievements, and goals.

Such product goals are also product manager goals since they’re responsible for the product.

In any case, setting up SMART product manager goals is the ideal way of ensuring that you ship and deliver great products.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1.     What are product goals examples?

The following are a few product goals examples:

  • Pass all quality checks of the industry and government.
  • Develop a secure, safe, and robust product by 2024.
  • Become the number one product management platform by 2024.
  • Get a $100 million valuation by the end of 2024.
  • Onboard 10,000 users of the product by the end of 2024.
  • Reach 5 million users in total by 2024.

It’s crucial to set SMART goals for all your products.

2.     What are the goals of a product?

Product goals are what you want your product to achieve as you move forward. They mark certain milestones, achievements, and crucial accomplishments that work toward making the product owner’s vision a reality.

Product goals help understand the importance of the product when it comes to the overall organizational goals and how it will help scale the business. That’s why all product goals have to follow the SMART goals framework.

3.     What makes a good product manager?

A good product manager understands the intricacies of the products and services they’re responsible for. They have a deep understanding of the product vision, KPIs, OKRs, product backlog, product features, and functionality.

PMs also have a great relationship with various product teams including the engineering team, development team, product marketing team, project managers, senior product managers, Scrum professionals, and other team members and stakeholders.

They do all of that using a very distinct set of hard and soft skills including excellent communication skills, interpersonal skills, leadership skills, strong marketing knowledge, subject matter expertise, good researching skills, expert strategy skills, and more.

4.     What are good goals for a product owner?

The product owner works to ensure that the final customer gets the absolute maximum value from the product or service. That’s why the product owner focuses on the functionality and new features of any product.

Therefore, product owner goals have to be very feature and functionality-specific. For example:

  • Ensure that 70% of the users start using the new feature.
  • Introduce the dark mode feature in the app by the end of 2024.
  • Communicate the secondary benefits of the product through product marketing channels in Q4.

Similar to product manager goals, product owner goals also need to follow the same SMART goals methodology.

5.     How do you set goals for a product manager?

Here’s a step-by-step process of setting your goals as a product manager:

  1. Understand the SMART goals framework to start setting your goals.
  2. Establish a list of short and long-term objectives for the product.
  3. Organize the goals by giving them a realistic timeline, along with certain metrics to track them.
  4. Deploy the performance goals across the product lifecycle and product roadmap.
  5. Develop a full-fledged KPI dashboard to track each goal.
  6. Use agile methodology and Scrum to implement new features along with the product owner.
  7. Keep updating previous goals and set new ones based on current progress.

Repeat the process each year or whenever you’re introducing a new product or product line.

Josh Fechter
Josh Fechter
Josh Fechter is the co-founder of Product HQ, founder of Technical Writer HQ, and founder and head of product of Squibler. You can connect with him on LinkedIn here.