An objective has two parts that do the work: the name, and the measures. Get those right and the rest follows. Get them wrong and no amount of check-in discipline saves it.
The name
The name is the part people remember. It is the only part that appears on a card, in a list, or on a dashboard. Write it so that a person who was not in the conversation understands what is meant to change.
Three tests:
Can it fail? “Support the sales team” cannot fail. There is no state of the world in which you did not support them at all. If an objective cannot fail, it cannot succeed either, and it tells you nothing.
Does it say what changes, not what happens? “Run four training sessions” says what happens. “Every rep can demo the new product unaided” says what changes.
Would somebody else write the same thing? If two people who both understand the objective would describe it differently, it is ambiguous. Name the specific thing.
Keep it short. The name field holds 80 characters, which is deliberate — it is about one line. Everything that does not fit belongs in the description.
Good names read as a finished state:
- Renewals are handled by the account team without engineering help
- New starters reach full productivity in four weeks
- The data warehouse serves finance reporting with no manual exports
The description
The description is where the context goes: why this matters now, what constraints apply, what has already been tried, what is explicitly out of scope.
The out-of-scope part earns its place. Most disagreements at review time are about whether something counted. Writing down what does not count, at the start, prevents nearly all of them.
The description holds 1,800 characters. That is enough for a paragraph or two — not a project plan.
Measures
A measure is how you will know. Each one is a short statement that is either true or false at the end.
Measures are where an objective stops being a wish. “New starters reach full productivity in four weeks” sounds precise, but two people will disagree about what full productivity means. Measures settle it before the work starts:
- A new starter completes their first solo customer call in week 3
- Manager sign-off on the week-4 competency checklist for every new starter
- No new starter needs a second onboarding session
Notice what these have in common. Each one can be checked by someone who was not involved. None of them requires a judgement about effort.
Two to four measures is right. One measure usually means the objective is really just that measure, and you should say so in the name. Five or more means you are describing a project rather than an outcome.
Do not make every measure a number. A false number is worse than an honest statement. “Customer satisfaction reaches 4.2” is only useful if you already measure customer satisfaction reliably. If you do not, “Every churned customer in Q3 has a recorded reason” is a better measure — it is checkable and it is true or false.
Each measure holds 320 characters. If a measure needs more than that, it is probably two measures.
Objective, task, or job
People new to objectives write tasks. It is the most common thing to fix in a first cycle.
A task has a doer and a deadline. It is done or not done. “Send the Q3 report to the board” is a task. Tasks belong in whatever tool the team uses for work, not here.
A job responsibility happens every cycle, forever. “Run the weekly team meeting” is a responsibility. It belongs in the role, not in an objective — if you set it as an objective, you will set it again next cycle, which tells you it was never an objective.
An objective is a change that will not happen on its own, that this person is best placed to make, and that will not still be true next cycle because it will be finished.
A quick test: if the objective would still make sense word-for-word next year, it is a responsibility.
Ambition
Set objectives that a good person achieves about seven times in ten.
Too easy and the objective tells you nothing — everybody hits it, so it does not distinguish good work from ordinary work. Too hard and people stop believing in the exercise, then quietly optimise for looking busy instead.
Seven in ten also means three in ten objectives are not achieved, in a healthy organisation. Plan for that. If a missed objective is treated as a failure of character rather than information, everybody will set easy objectives next cycle, and you will have lost the ability to tell the difference.
Before you save it
Read the objective back and ask:
- If I do nothing for three months, is it obvious that this has not happened?
- Could I hand this to someone else and would they know what to do?
- Is there a version of “done” that we would argue about?
If the answer to the third is yes, add a measure that settles the argument now.
If you use useful, the step-by-step instructions for putting an objective into the app are in the help centre, under Objectives.