The Words of Goals

I attended a sub team's sprint planning session today, where I noticed some goals are defined like this: “Investigate xxx running in yyy” “Finish building kkk” ... So I asked, “what does ‘investigate xxx’ mean?” “To find a short term solution for xxx.” “What is the impact of xxx currently?” “It triggers false alarms that page oncall after hour some time.” “Is there any immediate action oncall engineers can take on these alarms when they get paged?” “Not really. This problem doesn't have customer impact directly.” “There we go, why don't we just set the goal as: 'As a oncall engineer I want to remove the false alarms from xxx so that it stops paging oncall engineers after hour'? It is Specific to xxx, Measurable by stakeholders - either it stops paging oncall or not, Actionable - a code fix to adjust the alarm conditions will be merged and deployed, Relevant to oncall's experience, and it is time bounded by the sprint.” “OK...” “Now let's talk about 'finish building kkk', what does it mean?” “Ah, so we can dry run the commands of kkk.” “What does dry run mean specifically?” “We can run a command of kkk to complete the deployment of X.” “And which stage are we talking about exactly?” “We can run it in Gamma, just before the production stage.” “Cool. Now how about we redefine the goal as: ‘As an engineer of team X, I want to finish building kkk in Gamma stage so we can run a command to deploy X to Gamma successfully’?” ... The moral of the story: A good project, or a good sprint, starts from good words in defining the goals: Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant and Time Bounded. Pick the words carefully to define your goals, from the perspective of stakeholders - call out their persona, the one who will appreciate the value being delivered. Let me repeat that again: “Define your goals from the perspective of stakeholders.” A well defined goal shows your empathy to stakeholders - the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. It is also a manifestation of Customer Obsession - what Amazon is all about! “...the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies...” George Orwell