Source: Why and how: Long term product goals
Author: Allan Kelly
Section: 1 — Why long-term product goals matter
Reading time: 4 minutes
Tags: product-goal long-term-planning north-star three-planning-horizons okr-beyond-the-quarter product-vision goal-vs-objective product-cohesion sum-of-parts goal-investment
Summary: Kelly argues that OKRs are great for quarterly focus but leave a gap: what about the longer term? Without an overarching product goal, features and capabilities lack cohesion — the product becomes less than the sum of its parts. A goal-guided product is more than the sum of its parts because the goal provides a touchstone for every priority decision and trade-off.
Why and how: Long term product goals
Allan Kelly, 2026 – allan@allankelly.net
“What does your product want to be when it grows up?”
OKRs are great for the next quarter, but what about next year? Where do you want your product to be this time next year?
OKRs are great at allowing one to step away from the day-to-day and even sprint-to-sprint and take a slightly longer-term perspective, but is there more value to be had from stepping back even further and thinking further into the future?
I sometimes create a vague objective roadmap of the coming quarters. I say vague because it has to flex with the circumstances and if it looks too polished people will shy away from changing it. I worry too about calling this a “roadmap”, the term is elastic. All too often a “roadmap” is little more than a list of features with some random dates. (I will save the roadmap conversation for another day.)
Figure 1 - Three planning horizons from Succeeding with OKRs in Agile
If you have any questions about this document, the issues discussed, or the exercises please get in touch. Allan is always happy to discuss issues and provide any support he can. Contact him as allan@allankelly.net or book an call today Calendly - Allan Kelly.
After all, it is common to hear engineer say, “We need to know what the product needs to do in years to come so we can design it to last.” And perhaps more often to hear them say “The people who built this had no idea it was going to use it like this.” Thinking to the future can’t prevent every problem. Indeed, I’ve been known to argue that trying to future-proof products creates as many problems as it solves, but there is merit to giving it some thought.
In Succeeding with OKRs in Agile (Kelly, 2023) I talked about three planning horizons and rolling roadmaps but I didn’t talk about what the long-term looked like. At the time I was focused on getting people to think beyond the sprint.
Knowledge Exchange exercise
This paper discusses why long-term product goals are good to have and outlines two techniques for formulating such goals.
Knowledge exchange readers offered exercises for practice application of these ideas.
More than the sum of the parts
There are no free lunches in this world. Goals cost. They cost to create, they cost to share and they costs to keep them alive and to the fore. These costs are an investment. The time and money spent investing in goals will pay back in superior product and efficient working.
The hypothesis is: with a overarching goal your product will be more than the sum of the parts. Without a goal the pieces of the product, the capabilities, features, functionality, will lack cohesion. While useful in their own right they will not support each other - those parts might even conflict.
Put it another way:
Value of Goal Guided Product > ∑ parts
A product with a goal is more than the sum of the parts.
Value of Product (without goal) <= ∑ parts
A product without a goal is the sum of the parts.
As an added bonus, having a shared goal guides everyone on the team thereby making them more productive and work more coherent.
At the same time, a goal provides a touch stone when deciding what to include, what to leave out, and for making priority calls. However, staying true to the goal will mean foregoing some opportunities because they do not fit. While everyone sometimes make exceptions there comes a point where many exceptions, responding to immediate requests, render the goal irrelevant.
You are free to reject the hypothesis, and you are free to forego the cost of creating and maintaining a product goal. Although that might mean an informal goal of “Servicing all requests and grabbing the opportunities of the moment.”
The question is: do you, and your organization, believe that investing in a goal (creating, sharing, keeping the discipline to actively work to the goal, foregoing non-goal activities and periodically reviewing) creates more value than doing what is important right now?
Products
While OKRs can be used to deliver projects it is with products that they fit most naturally. Projects have end dates; success is delivering everything which was asked for in the time allowed.
Products last longer, products are only done when markets no longer want them. That means there needs to be some framework within which direct work. OKRs can provide that framework for the next goal. But, since OKRs typically last 3 months the next question is: what is the framework for choosing OKRs and making long-term decisions?
For some it can make sense to only think about the next goal when it gets close, total reactivity might be the right thing for start-ups still searching for productmarket fit. More often it helps to have some broader, longer range, goal to create context and guide the chosen near term goals.
For example, even at start up searching for market fit, where OKRs are reset every 10 weeks there is a longer-term goal: find market fit. The company may seem experimental, even chaotic, but running in many directions at the same time might be the best way of trying many different hypotheses.
So, at the risk of talking myself into a third edition, it’s time to explore the longer term product. Keeping with the ethos of Succeeding and OKRs, it probably isn’t a surprise that I’m say that longer term needs to be a goal.
Scrum calls this the Product Goal (Sutherland and Schwaber, 2011), others call it North Star, or perhaps True North; may a Product Vision, or you might even call it a Mission or talk about Jobs to Be Done (Christensen et al., 2007). I’m agnostic as to what you call it, they are all the equal to me: big, broad goals that are somewhere in the future.
When discussing companies I like to talk about purpose, I’m not sure that works for products, it might but perhaps not always. Whatever term is used I’m
thinking: “what does this product want to be when it grows up?”. In the longer term, what is the vision? What guides decisions? What is the overarching raison d’être?
Substitute whatever term you prefer, I’ll say Long-term goal for now. (Notice I say goal, not objective. There is a difference which I’ll explain.)