Insightful. Love the idea of inverting the problem to identify pitfalls, it's such a clever mental model for debugging our life goals. As a teacher, I see how crucial clarity is. But sometimes I wonder if purly quantitative goals risk missing the 'why' behind them. A thought.
The idea of SMART Goals is great. If it's not a SMART Goal, it's more like a wish.
But I think SMART goals are overrated. Nobody has ever come to a sprint planning and said, "Our goals should be to make the app faster" (but maybe I was just lucky 😄).
And after wrapping up my career at an enterprise, two things are clear to me:
- good engineers thinking in smart goals by default, if not, they correct each other
- people who have no clue will be vocal about SMART goals but never set up one (ask you to do it instead)
I’ve worked with quite a few 'wish-like' engineers, but they were early in their careers, and shaping goals to SMART really helped them. I agree that for 'good engineers,' these are concrete goals from the beginning
Thanks for sharing this. I very much liked the clever approach of using counter-examples.
WRT content:
“.,,who advocated that goals need to be: specific, measurable, assignable, realistic, and time-bound.”
I guess you meant achievable and relevant, didn’t you?
I’ve just edited my previous comment to show the truly appreciation I felt. I had written it in a hurry and it sounded a bit rude. Apologies!
It didn't sound rude to me, no worries.
Actually, the very first proposal for the SMART criteria used 'assignable' and 'realistic'.
Sorry for the late response, I was on holiday.
Insightful. Love the idea of inverting the problem to identify pitfalls, it's such a clever mental model for debugging our life goals. As a teacher, I see how crucial clarity is. But sometimes I wonder if purly quantitative goals risk missing the 'why' behind them. A thought.
I think of 'why' as a starting point. Otherwise, SMART goals might push people to achieve something, but do they really need it?
The idea of SMART Goals is great. If it's not a SMART Goal, it's more like a wish.
But I think SMART goals are overrated. Nobody has ever come to a sprint planning and said, "Our goals should be to make the app faster" (but maybe I was just lucky 😄).
And after wrapping up my career at an enterprise, two things are clear to me:
- good engineers thinking in smart goals by default, if not, they correct each other
- people who have no clue will be vocal about SMART goals but never set up one (ask you to do it instead)
Thanks for sharing your take, Akos.
I’ve worked with quite a few 'wish-like' engineers, but they were early in their careers, and shaping goals to SMART really helped them. I agree that for 'good engineers,' these are concrete goals from the beginning
Yep, I agree that, as a rule of thumb, for people early in their careers, this is more impactful. others, just make sure you don't forget using it 😄
SMART goals is probably the most common framework for setting goals. I've not run into any other frameworks in my career :P
And thanks for the shoutout!
Well-deserved shout-out, Adler.
It is common indeed. Maybe it's worth writing about others :)