Setting quarterly goals

We plan objectives every quarter. The exec team set the direction and overall objectives for PostHog, and then small teams set their own objectives that feed into these. Longer-term planning that the exec team does is covered separately here.

How quarterly planning works

1. James runs this process every three months.
2. ~3 weeks before the end of each quarter, the Exec team meet to come up with initial ideas for objectives for each small team.
3. ~2 weeks before the end of the quarter, Kendal schedules planning meetings with each small team to go through these - these will be run by the Team Lead and include the relevant Exec team member, following the template below. Each small team can change or propose alternate objectives, goals, and/or key results (we are not prescriptive about the exact terms used here - use these as a starting point).
4. The outcome of these meetings should be a PR to the relevant small team page. The Team Lead is responsible for creating this and getting it merged. Make sure you tag the relevant member of the Exec team for review.
5. PRs get merged before the next quarter starts. We usually then run through the objectives in the first all hands of the next quarter.

Planning template

## Previous quarter reflection

[Paste in previous quarter objectives from the team page]

For each objective, write up a reflection - usually the person who was the lead on the objective should do this, but some might be shared.

You may also want to write some overall thoughts about how the quarter generally went.

## HOGS

Get each person to answer these questions in their own doc, then go round the group for each question to get thoughts. It's ok to plus 1 someone else to save time - this section can overrun if you're not careful!

- Hope
  - What are you most excited about this quarter?
  - What exploration do you want to do?
- Obstruction
  - Is there anything embarrassing about your product?
  - What’s stopping you from shipping 2x what you’re shipping now?
- Growth
  - What single thing would move the needle the most this quarter?
  - What are users asking for that we’re ignoring?
- Sneak attack
  - Say a competitor beats your team’s product, what would that product do differently?
  - What are we not talking about enough?

## Current quarter objectives

This is an example - feel free to adapt as you need. Generally it is a good idea to have at least one person's name against each thing for accountability even if multiple people work on it - shared goals usually results in less getting shipped. 

Objective 1: PostHog in the EU
Motivation: Unblock 1,000s of customers [link to data] who need to keep data in the EU but are not capable of self hosting.
What we'll ship:
  - This thing (Name)
  - Another thing (Name)
  - Maybe another thing (Name)

Why we do this

• Sense of winning / losing - this bonds teams, increases urgency and creates satisfaction when we achieve things
• Clarifies our direction

Good goal setting

• As few Objectives as possible
• Motivation - explains why the objective is set
• Thing's we'll ship that show if we're en route to achieving an Objective
• Objectives are simple - it's really clear if you are/aren't hitting them
• Objectives are ambitious - they move the needle for PostHog
• Hitting an overarching Objective is more important than shipping specific things
• Things we'll ship are leading indicators and can be achieved quickly
• If you set specific targets, they should be specific and measurable if possible
• Setting anti-goals can be helpful to clarify what you are not working on

Bear the following in mind:

• Use metrics only if they help you
• Don't fall into an existential crisis every time we do this exercise - while Objectives are important, they're easy to change, so iterate if you need to mid-quarter
• All Objectives are bad - they have many compromises, are fallible, easy to game, or may be affected by external factors, so use the least bad ones
• Use counter metrics where needed (X happens, but Y shouldn't happen)
• Don't have a lot of things to ship if you can't capture everything in one - just pick the most important one or two
• Don't set arbitrary targets that a team cannot achieve
• Consistently hitting ambitious Objectives over the long term is an important factor in the pay review process, but if you miss extremely tough Objectives but still achieve great things en route, that's great

FAQ

What if I don't have time to do work towards my objectives because of X (X = customer support / urgent board reporting / something else)?

Picking up the occasional thing that isn't technically going to help your goal is ok. This is because we're small and may not set 100% perfect goals. As ever, prioritize as you see fit. However, spending a bunch of time on a pet project is not - this means the planning process has failed.

If my team repeatedly miss objectives, what happens?

Objectives should be ambitious but achievable - you should be able to hit them by challenging yourself, but not to the point of burnout.

If your team is consistently missing objectives, they are too hard or possibly the wrong objectives for PostHog/your team.