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End of Year Goals

over 8 years ago from , Product Designer at Treehouse

I work for a small team (4 people) and at the beginning of 2014 we laid out some personal and business goals. Did/do you guys do this? Where did you land on your goals?

Some of our goals in an orderly order but not in order of importance: 1.) Deliver better overall web experience to clients and their clients. (This was expected to HEAVILY influence #2) 2.) Increase revenue by ~50% (on track with 3 year trend) 3.) Increase team size by 2 (this sounds more arbitrary than it was at the time. Conceived to be heavily conditional on #1 and #2) 4.) Have a team member present information at a conference or meetup. 5.) Revive and refresh Show-ee.com 6.) A lot of per team member calls to action to be more involved in the overall web community as well as writing Blog posts, posting Dribbble shots and the like.

How did we do? • Deliver better experience: We think we've done this. Repeat business from Intel and NOAA Sea Grant Coalitions has been a real vote of confidence. We committed ourselves to start evaluating both deliverables for clients and build processes and some of the speed we've gained there has paid off in spades as far as delivering more than promised goes.

• Increase revenue by ~50%: Not even close. We're going to stay really close to our numbers from last year. As we reported in a blog post a while back, we had a really rough end-of-summer (along with everyone else in the web service industry). Luckily we didn't have to lay anyone off but our cash reserves were greatly depleted.

• Increase team size: We added a part time Content Strategy person. She's rather new to the internet but a great writer overall. We're still getting accustomed to working her into projects but she's definitely changed our process for the better. We're more content-first focused - a lot less Lorem Ipsum.

• Conference or meetup: Nope. But our founder and main dude Marcus Neto will be making the rounds on a few podcasts in 2015.

• Revive Show-ee: Yep. Did it. It's been a pretty low priority since work has started coming through but in 2015 we'll rework some things.

• Engage the web community and write and post and stuff: This was more of a personal thing. I want to be a voice among the other voices personally so I wrote some and tried to Dribbble as much as I could. Wish I would have done both more than I did.

Man I wrote a lot. Let's talk about you folks and your goals?

2 comments

  • Eugene RossEugene Ross, over 8 years ago
    1. Start Up ✓
    2. Cash In ☐
    3. Sell Out ☐
    4. Bro Down ☐
    4 points
  • Alan IonitaAlan Ionita, over 8 years ago (edited over 8 years ago )

    I guess I'm against the grain since I tend to set yearly goals in June/July because that's when I'm most productive, but anyway here they are:

    1. Being more active [started cycling, running, hiking + getting ready for a long touring trip]

    2. Learning basic frontend [html, css, and a bit javascript so far, but I already started to notice a huge difference when chatting to the team and looking at problems]

    3. Be a good PM/person [be nice, always have a laugh, ignore mistakes, focus on results and process, speak to clients/people a lot even when you don't want to]

    4. go on 4 trips per year [1 down 3 to go but I've got a feeling I might fail this one]

    5. Learning basic design principles [got started with Design+Code, but haven't got to where I want to be yet, got 6months to turn this around]

    6. Launch a physical product [finished the design, built 2 prototypes, got some feedback...now I just need to develop it further, create the landing page, and start shouting about it]

    0 points