Putting cross-team coordination on autopilot

Live Goals allow your team to track and see progress against projects and initiatives. They are as much about communication as they are about alignment. Most remote and hybrid teams suffer from an “alignment gap” because the tools they currently use do a poor job of keeping teammates focused on the big goal. These tools are too close to the daily work.

This typical “alignment gap” is a source of enormous frustration for so many teams: competing priorities, infighting, disconnection, lack of focus, overly large meetings, and more. Everyone is working feverishly, but it seems like no progress is being made toward the big things that matter to your team. This gap can be excruciating for a leader who has to deliver results.

Using Live Goals

As a manager or lead, you need to do two things:

1. Keep your team focused on making progress on the most important work.
2. Keep stakeholders informed and aligned on what's going on at a high level.

Live goals help you do both, simultaneously.

Let's say you're an engineering manager responsible for shipping a major new iteration of a feature by the end of the quarter. It an important feature, and upper management wants to keep close tabs on progress. Step 1 is creating a new Live goal. Your title should reflect the outcome your hoping to achieve, so you'd call it something like "Ship Dashboard 2.0".

Use the description to flesh out details about the goal; what the purpose of the goal is, the business impact, key results, etc. In the sidebar, set a due date and update cadence for the goal, and include all the teams and contributors that need to be involved. Every team and person you add here will automatically get updates whenever you post an update; your team, peer teams, stakeholders, etc.

Adding sub-goals

Depending on the scope of the goal, you might want to break things down into sub-goals that squads or individuals can own. You can do that via the "+ sub-goal" button on any Goal page, or via the "Parent goal" field when you're creating a goal. Just remember; setting goals with your team should be a collaborative process so people feel genuine ownership over their goals.

If you make sub-goals, keep the team and contributors narrow, set their cadence at "weekly", and set the parent goal cadence to "bi-weekly" or "monthly". That way, you get a steady drip of updates from your team that you can use to summarize progress at a higher level that's more suitable for stakeholders.

Inviting followers

You might not want to add entire other teams to your goal, or stakeholders might not be part of a team at all. No problem. Anyone can choose to follow your goal, and get updates just like involved teams and contributors. Just give people a heads up in chat or email, and let them know how to follow along (choose "follow" from the ••• menu on the goal page).

Communicating progress

At this point, you've got a complete map of who's doing what and why. As your team works, they'll get reminders and post weekly goal updates that let you (and the rest of your team) know how much progress has been made, their confidence level in reaching the goal, and any other important details.

When it's time for you to write an update for the wider audience, Steady makes it easy. Every sub-goal update since your last update is listed in the sidebar, and you can (and should) use the Quick Fill button in the rich text editor to generate summaries of each one of those updates. You can use those summaries at the end of your update for anyone who wants to read more (the summaries link to the original updates), or you can use them as a starting point for your update. Your call.

Once you publish your update, everyone involved and every follower will get the update in their Digest and any notification channels they have configured. Even better, every update gets added to the goal page to create a complete, end-to-end story of progress on a single page.

That's all there is to it; everyone aligned, everyone informed, no surprises, no meetings.

Creating Live Goals

The smallest unit of measure should be “project sized”.

Live Goals are about the big picture over periods of time, not granular tasks. With that in mind, the smallest unit of measure for a goal should be “project-sized”. Keep in mind that every goal assumes that whoever “owns” the goal will provide updates on it. Don’t make a goal for it if you don’t want to report on it! Roll it up with a similar goal into a broader objective instead.

Creating effective Live Goals

Goals come in infinite flavors, but you should ask yourself two questions before creating a goal in Steady:

1. Will this be helpful for me to see every day? Live Goals in Steady show up on your daily check-in sidebar. Ideally, you want a goal that’ll help you maintain focus on the kind of progress you want to make.
2. Do I want to write about this? Remember that Live Goals in Steady are essentially short-lived micro-blogs about a particular subject. If you don’t want to write about it or don’t think you’d have anything to say, consider a different goal.

Keep it focused

Live Goals exist to create focus. Creating too many is inherently counterproductive. People should own one to two max. It keeps focus high and “alignment effort” low.

Live Goals are great for team professional development too

No one’s stopping you if you want to make a “Let’s improve our accessibility” goal that you use to share, learn, discuss, and reflect.

Live Goal owners shouldn’t only be managers

If only a few people own Live Goals, only a few people get heard. When everyone owns a goal, everyone has a dedicated venue to share their work.

Live Goals are most effective when they’re not handed down

Alignment requires buy-in, and buy-in happens when everyone has a hand in crafting their Live Goals. Consider a cascading approach where the manager/leader sets a top-level goal, and folks underneath create their own goals that support it.

Higher level = lower frequency

Consider longer cadences like bi-weekly or monthly for team goals, and weekly cadence for individual goals. That means whenever it’s time to provide a team goal update, you’re guaranteed to have updates from supporting goals on tap.

Creating and assigning Live Goals to multiple teams

It's common for larger goals and initiatives to have multiple teams contributing to them. We make it easy to share a Live Goal across multiple teams.

When creating your Live Goal, simply select the teams in the Teams involved drop-down menu.

The Live Goal will display on each team's Goals page, and members of each team will receive notifications whenever a Goal update is published.

What your team can expect when they're assigned a Live Goal

When team members are made an owner of a Live Goal, they'll receive weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly reminders to provide an update. They'll also see an action item on their Daily Digest page.

They can also provide an update at any time by selecting the goal and the "Post update" button.

The cadence and day of the week can be customized by editing the goal. To edit a goal, click on the name of the goal and select from the "..." menu to the right of the goal name.

To set the day of the week that you received reminders, change the start date to that day of the week.

Common Use Cases

Staying up-to-date on high-priority projects and initiatives.

Live Goals make it easy to keep everyone in the loop on important projects and initiatives. Goals can be shared across teams, so when a goal owner gives an update, it’s shared with everyone across those teams.

Eliminating regular status meetings.

Most companies have regular weekly or bi-weekly meetings on specific topics. Use Live Goals to automate those updates and keep everyone coordinated without requiring synchronous meetings.

Sharing progress on quarterly goals and OKRs.

If your team uses quarterly goals and OKRs, Live Goals are a great way to communicate progress, risk, and overall status. Leadership has the visibility they need, and goal owners can highlight their work without burdensome processes like creating PowerPoints and attending long meetings.

Sprint demos

Create a "Sprint Demos" Live Goal, and at the end of each sprint, record a video of your demo and add it as a goal update. Team members can view the demo and ask questions or provide feedback with comments. Over time, you'll have a reach history of your team's impact across sprints.

Planning

With a "Planning" Live Goal, PMs and leads can create an update for the upcoming iteration with the initial plan and priorities, and others on the team can ask questions, provide estimates, or coordinate on vacation time.

Post-release updates

When a team spends time building a feature, they want to know how it performs once it is released. With Live Goal updates, you can share customer feedback, metrics, and the overall impact that the team is having on your business.