My 2024 Work Goals.
Whether they are big or small, goal setting is a key to unlocking great change.
At the end of the year, I always put together a list of personal goals I want to accomplish in the coming year. They can be anywhere from reading 20 books to losing 50 pounds. Once I get to the end of the year, I’ll review how I did, celebrate the wins, and then make a new list for the following year.
However, I wanted to change it up this year and write what I want to achieve professionally within the calendar year. I will document them here, and then over the year, I will check back in with them to review how I’ve been progressing.
I have 3 different focus areas that I’m going to work on throughout the year that I’ve identified based on gaps I saw over 2023. Let’s check them out.
Planning out and executing more tests
Looking back at my 2023, I believe my biggest win was not a software-related change. In late 2022 - not long after I started at my company - I was brought onto a project internally pitched successfully with a green light to deliver. However, there was limited interest in investing development time to support the initiative. Fast forward to 2024, and we’re on the verge of a full-scale rollout.
What was the biggest contributor to the success?
The answer: we heavily invested our time into planning and executing a test.
Dreaming up ways you can test is only part of the battle. The real challenge is putting on paper everything you’ll need to be able to tell a story about the success of your test. With everything in place in advance, we could close out our first test and quickly combine our measurements with the feedback we received from the field and tell a story of success parlayed into additional tests throughout the rest of the year.
In 2024, I plan to find additional ways to leverage hypotheses/tests within our org. I will lean heavily into tests that require low development time and effort and can be measured without creating new measurement tools.
Finding more effective ways to deliver change management
Aside from growing the planning and execution of tests, one of the big challenges I’ve seen consistently within my company is the way we do change management. Particularly, I want to learn about change management related to what is ultimately my primary internal customer/department - our sales team.
As with any big organization, there can be quite a few hurdles to delivering something new/different, but I believe that we, as product people, often have just the right balance of business and tech to help shape what happens with change management. In recent months, I’ve been working on a few potential ways to deliver insights into software and process changes to our team members.
I’ll need to test them to see how well they are received. Still, I’m most excited about finding an effective usage of TikTok-style videos that combine visuals of the change and any commentary that a team member may find useful. Our sales team is always on the road, and having a video that they’ll be able to hear and reference multiple times as a reminder in addition to a standard pager, I think, will be a win.
A renewed focus on feature simplicity
There’s a good chance that the development teams have been asked to build some overly complex minimal value-adding features over time. Most of us could rifle off a handful of examples of a field or a process that once aspired to be the greatest of all the features but fell flat for some reason and now haunts your UI.
In 2024, I will take a 2 prong approach with how I shape the work to be done.
Firstly, I plan to inventory all of the “tech debt” features and processes and dig deeper to find out what’s being used, what could be repurposed, and what is detrimental to the experience. Once I have an understanding of these features and their impact, I’m going to make it a point to be able to devote some dev time to cleaning up.
Secondly, I will highly concentrate on how I shape the work to put simplicity at the forefront. My primary “customers” can navigate all the tools they need to do their job but tend to spend so much time bouncing between applications, and I want to change this. Additionally, the new team members' learning curve during onboarding is heavy, and I want to help shorten this time from the start date to feeling comfortable with our product(s).
So we’re going to make these the immediate focuses in Q1 and we will check back in after the quarter is over to see how we fared. Excited to dive in and make an impact and hopefully you’re thinking about the same in your work life.
Have some 2024 goals you’re looking to accomplish? I would love to hear about them. Click on the button below and let me know.
Take care and HAPPY NEW YEAR!
These goals probably require major efforts to achieve, but they also look worthwhile. Good luck for the new year, Mike!