But I Already Gave You the Goals
Your CEO set the goal, said it out loud, and cannot see what is unclear about it. You cannot turn it into a roadmap, and you cannot point at what is missing. It is not more detail, it is the picture the goal was a headline for.
A while ago I was running a roadmap workshop with the leadership team of a startup.
Roadmap work always begins with crystallizing goals, so that’s where we started.
As in most cases, everyone cited the revenue target for the year as the goal. But I started asking more questions about it before moving on to the actual roadmap.
I addressed most of my questions to the CEO, as he was the one setting the goal. He had good answers. However, many of them were never said out loud until that moment. Together, we realized that the goals actually didn’t even mean total revenue. The number he had in mind and everyone was working against was for new revenue only. He was also assuming no churn on top of it.
Digging deeper, I found out that not all revenue was welcome. He wanted US customers, with well known logos, and only above a certain deal size.
Nobody else in the room had heard any of it before the workshop.
That’s not an uncommon case. Most leadership teams I work with believe that they are setting clear goals and strategy. Most are wrong.
But whenever I raise a gap, and they see that there is more to it than they thought, they ask — rightfully — for an example.
I want to give one, but I have very little to work with: I can’t use a real client’s strategy, because that’s obviously confidential. An invented example wouldn’t do the trick either, because the details matter. Instead, I recently found an example from another domain that works perfectly. It does require you to elevate it back to your own company, but I found that to be pretty straightforward.
So here it is — test your own strategy and goal setting against it, and the gaps will surface.
Knowing what you’re really after
The example I use starts with this simple goal: moving from living in an apartment to living in a private house, within two years.
Is that a good goal? On the surface it is: It is concrete, it has a date, and you would know whether it happened.
But to meet the real goal, and not just the stated one, you have to go further.
People move to a private house for different reasons. Because the children need somewhere to play outside. Because you can’t stand the city noise (but still need to work there). Because you have family coming over to stay frequently and you need space for them.
Each of those leads to a different house.
A house with a tiny yard is still a private house. The stated goal is met exactly, but the children still can’t play outside.
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You have to know what you are really after before you can move any further.
Choosing how you get there
After you uncovered the real goal, the question becomes how to get there.
Note that this is an important moment in time where you have to stop yourself from running to the details of what to do next. We will get there, but if you want a strategy, it’s about a path that will lead you to your goals, not your immediate next steps.
There are many potential routes to get to any goal.
Here are a few for our example: Let’s say that the major question is how you get the money to upgrade where you live (We might then realize that finding the actual house is not so easy either, but that could be a second step). How do you finance your way into a house? And let’s assume you know how much your current apartment is worth, and how much mortgage you can take, and there is still a gap. How are you going to go about it? You can cut back and save hard for a while, you can dip into the savings you already have, or you can rent out the apartment and rent a house instead.
All of those are valid paths to your goal, assuming the numbers work, and they are not even the only ones. In a recent discussion with a startup leadership forum, when I gave that example, someone stopped me and started raising more paths. For example, we can find a way to increase our income. And then someone else said, you can get divorced and marry a rich husband 😉. There really are more options once you start scratching the surface.
But then the question becomes how to decide. Some of those paths will contradict your constraints. For example, if you are unable to save enough money every month, maybe two years is unrealistic. Or maybe that means that this path is not the right one for you. You might find yourself in a trade-off game where no option meets all of your constraints, but you still have to choose.
Telling it to someone who wasn’t there
Now that you know your goal in depth, and you have debated and decided on the right path to get there, it’s time to share it with others. The goal of this part is not to inform them, but to help them understand and own it, so they can make the million decisions that they would need to, following your decided strategy.
Many companies write their goals and their strategy as a bullet point list. It is very tempting to think that this is the best way, short and sweet. But I have found the opposite to be true.
If we go with bullet points for the example above, it would look like this: We want to move into a house in two years. It’s for the children to be able to play outside. We will save X amount of money each month. And that’s it.
If you are the one who needs to execute on that plan, it doesn’t really help you to do that well. Because saving the money, for example, might mean cutting back on eating out, but also might mean moving to a smaller apartment in the meantime or cancelling the annual trip abroad.
A better version of it would tell you not just the bottom line, but also how management thought about it: We want to move into a house in two years. We’ve been wanting that for a long time, and we now think it’s possible. Our primary goal is to have plenty of space for the kids to play outside freely. We think the best way is selling our apartment and taking a bigger mortgage (rather than renting out our apartment and renting a house instead of buying one, which we ruled out because of this and that). However, we still need X amount of money on top of that. Here is what we considered for that part: cutting back on our expenses, dipping into our savings, bringing in a second income. Based on our calculations, we need to save XX every month for 18 months before we can start looking for a house. We think this is doable by cutting back a little on everyday expenses (eat out less, have one streaming subscription instead of the three that we have today, don’t buy new cars until we’re settled in the new house, buy in bulk etc.). We think that’s the best way because it means minor adjustments to how we live today, nothing too dramatic, and still gets us to our goal. We considered getting there faster by canceling our annual trip abroad, but this is a family tradition and our one time a year to be together and experience new places. We would rather keep it going.
If you now need to decide what to do, for example, with kids’ activities, you will know that the rule of thumb is probably to cut them from four a week to two. You are looking for something that would not make you feel like you’re missing too much, but still saves money each month. Without the details here, you could have thought that the best option is to cut activities altogether, but that’s obviously not what we want for ourselves as a family.
None of this takes longer than the bullet list. It does take deciding out loud, and writing down what you decided against. That is the part everyone else needs, and if you skip it, your strategy can’t be executed even if you thought it out perfectly.
Our free e-book “ Speed-Up the Journey to Product-Market Fit” — an executive’s guide to strategic product management is waiting for you at www.infinify.com/ebook
Originally published at https://infinify.com on September 2, 2026.
Originally published at https://infinify.com on September 10, 2026.
