As December is rolling to its end, magic is coming closer. We close our business year, finish our major tasks, and stop for a while to look back. It’s a perfect time to stop hustling and take your time to plan the next year.
The New Year’s atmosphere inspires us to dream and make big promises. We all want to get better results and experience fewer failures. With all that in mind, we take our time to create a list of our resolutions. And here we are, full of determination, sitting in total frustration with no single line added to the list.
Sound familiar, right? When it comes to New Year’s resolutions, we all get stuck. Product managers or software engineers, business analysts or project managers - whoever we are - we all could be uncertain about the future. We want our resolutions to be ambitious and motivational, but also reasonable and realistic.
Where’s that balance? Product owners from Stiltsoft know the answer. Just take the SMART goal technique from Scrum and bring it to your New Year’s table to create your best New Year resolutions ever.
SMART goals stand for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Initially designed for Agile methodologies, they are perfect for our holiday resolutions.
So how do you apply this SMART technique? Let’s say you want to keep a healthier lifestyle in 2022. You can put it just like that, making your New Year’s resolutions. The only problem is that it will probably stay just a dream. But we can go with SMART goals here and make it:
- specific (I will eat fewer sweets and take more exercise)
- measurable ( I will eat no more than 50 g of sweets per day and walk 5 km every day)
- achievable (In January, I will reduce sugar consumption by 20% and exercise at least once a week)
- relevant (I will keep a healthy lifestyle to start running with my friends in the morning next summer)
- time-bound (At the end of 2022, I will eat no more than 50 g of sweets per day and take exercise at least three times a week).
Does it sound better now? I hope so! With SMART goals, you’re all equipped with one of the favorite tools of product owners to make New Year’s resolutions that will really come true.
At Stiltsoft, I extensively use SMART goals when working on our products. But as the holiday season is approaching, I wanted to get more personal and share some PM tips that work great for me. Last year I made New Year’s resolutions according to SMART goals, and it was much easier to track their progress and keep them. Go agile in everyday activities. It may result in success.
