As a product manager, you must be ready 24/7 for shifts in multiple roles. One time during the day, you function like a strategist, while the other minute, you are talking to a customer. Later on, you are busy with the marketing trends, and then you look over the changes in your product. You play all these roles at the tick of the clock! But how do you keep track of each role while being alternatively busy with the other? The answer to this is GOALS.
Setting goals for each role will help you keep a check on your progress. Tracking your daily work to add up to the overall goal should be your top #1 priority. As a Product Manager in NYC, you should read further to know more if you wish to plan and manage your goals according to the deadline. This blog will highlight seven techniques product managers use to keep track of goals within time.
Making A Goal Chart:
You’ve probably heard many business trainers say, “Make a goal chart; it’s effective,” but you somehow ended up not doing it. So, this is your sign to make a goal chart! Let me state a few points about its effectiveness.
- Helps in stating clear expectations:
Your goal, the company’s end goal, how you align your plan so the company can progress, and the time required to achieve it are all mentioned clearly in a goal chart. These inclusions allow you to check what needs to be done at a glance.
- Great motivator:
You place your goal chart where you can easily see it, which motivates you to work towards it. It also helps you define your purpose, the step you are at, and the modifications you need to make to achieve the end goal.
- Proximity towards the end goal:
A well-defined goal chart clearly shows how close you are to your goal: you can manage your time and modify your steps and the process that helps you reach your end goal.
- Gives a direction to work in:
With the multiple roles you are engaged in, you can sometimes lose the direction you were working in! A goal chart helps you be in constant check of your end goal and work in the direction to achieve it.
Setting Achievable Goals:
As a product manager, setting achievable goals should be your mantra. Small successes add to a big one, and achievable goals are your small successes. Apart from giving you satisfaction and elating your joy, it also boosts your confidence in work, which is extremely important for your position.
Achievable goals, when achieved, give you a sense of relief. They allow you to manage your time effectively and identify areas where you can be more productive. Setting achievable goals also helps trigger new behaviors, guide the focus, and sustain momentum in life.
In the end, you can’t manage what you don’t measure or improve upon something you don’t properly manage.
Aligning Short-Term Goals With Long Term Goals
Firstly, setting two individual goals is necessary as short-term goals are small steps towards achieving long-term ones. Well, defining both of them and aligning them to achieve the end goal is the task.
Planning long-term goals first helps define short-term goals easily. All you have to do is break the long-term goal into small achievable goals. For example, when the main goal is to increase the sales of your gym wear. The short-term goal would be to define how to improve the sales ratio.
The steps for these could be 360-degree marketing of your product, drafting discounts or offers for better sale of the product, establishing referral codes, distributing coupons, defining benefits of the product and influencing people to buy it, getting customer reviews, posting them, and so on.
Setting A Deadline:
All your efforts will go to waste if you don’t set a proper deadline for your goals. Nobody wants to work cluelessly without knowing when to complete the given work.
Setting a deadline instills a sense of responsibility and ownership toward completing the work. It also helps you manage your time effectively, plan your work accordingly and complete the task.
It also creates a sense of urgency in the task-doer and makes them feel that their contribution and work are essential and relevant to the company’s growth. It helps you reach your goals faster as you have set a dedicated time by which the task should be accomplished.
Tracking Progress:
All the above steps will only be relevant if the progress is tracked. As a product manager, you’ll have to keep constant track of the progress because that is what matters in the end.
Tracking progress helps you check where you are headed exactly. Are your efforts giving results? Is your hard work paying off? Just like the example mentioned above about gym wear, if you don’t check whether the marketing is giving you the required result and helping you maximize the sales, how would you know if the result is being achieved? So, tracking progress is the main part of your job as a product manager.
Changing Work Pattern:
If due, for some reason, your strategies are not working, by tracking your progress, you come to know that you can always change the work pattern.
For example: if marketing was your step towards achieving the goal and you aren’t able to get results despite investing in marketing- you can change the mode of marketing-from offline to online or from social media to an online shopping platform, etc.
Realigning your goals:
After the change in working pattern, you have to draft and realign your short-term goals with your long-term goals so that it matches.
Change in work patterns brings about a lot of changes, and a lot of work is required to make the current pattern work. Once done, you must repeat the 7-step technique for any other goals or priorities for your work task.
Takeaway,
If you are a product manager recruiter looking for an efficient product manager, your search ends here with Palarino. We provide top-quality product managers that use the above seven techniques to keep track of goals within time. We can provide the product manager recruiter with the right product manager in NYC. This blog is helpful for all product managers wanting to keep track of their goals with time.
