Live Goals in Status Hero allow your team to track and see progress against projects and initiatives. They are as much about communication as they are about alignment. Most remote and hybrid teams suffer from an “alignment gap” because the tools they currently use do a poor job of keeping teammates focused on the big goal. These tools are too close to the daily work.
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This typical “alignment gap” is a source of enormous frustration for so many teams: competing priorities, infighting, disconnection, lack of focus, overly large meetings, and more. Everyone is working feverishly, but it seems like no progress is being made toward the big things that matter to your team. This gap can be excruciating for a leader who has to deliver results.

Live Goals in Status Hero fill that gap.

Each Live Goal exists as sort of a short-lived micro-blog with regular, rich context updates right alongside the Goal. No longer will you get to the end of the quarter only to be reminded of that goal you set at the beginning that you haven’t heard anything about in 90 days.

You’ll go from the present day of having a fuzzy understanding of what your team is doing to a totally new way of working with a living high-level view of what’s going on without the surprises.

It’s one thing to plan goals every quarter or year; it’s another thing entirely to actually stick with them over weeks and months. If goals exist as part of a presentation or doc that people have to actively seek out, you’re not setting yourselves up for success. Live Goals in Status Hero help teams maintain alignment in two unique ways:

There are plenty of good meetings. In a remote or hybrid context, face-time is critical for building relationships and team cohesion. And then there are status meetings. They’re usually long, usually boring, always a time and money drain. Live Goals replace status meetings with a living 30,000 foot view of where your priorities stand and blog-like updates, freeing calendars and saving a whole lot of time and money.

Autonomy is a key component to an engaged, motivated team, and the key to making

autonomy work is by giving everyone the context they need to make quality, independent decisions that are aligned with the needs of the company.

Progress alone isn’t a reliable signal for understanding whether or not a goal is on track, because progress isn’t linear. You need a predictive signal to fill in the blanks. Live Goals track confidence alongside progress to give you a quick, clear, accurate signal of where things stand — and critically — do it early enough to be actionable.

Team culture doesn’t happen through bot-powered “ice-breakers”. Team culture happens when people share their successes, failures, challenges, experience, insights, and knowledge and everyone else responds in kind. Live Goals equal more trust, empathy, and respect.

In most companies, it’s at minimum, an enormous effort to figure out where things stand across the entire org. With Live Goals, it’s an instant read.

Live Goals are about the big picture over periods of time, not granular tasks. With that in mind, the smallest unit of measure for a goal should be “project-sized”. Keep in mind that every goal assumes that whoever “owns” the goal will provide updates on it. Don’t make a goal for it if you don’t want to report on it! Roll it up with a similar goal into a broader objective instead.

Goals come in infinite flavors, but you should ask yourself two questions before creating a goal in Status Hero:

Live Goals exist to create focus. Creating too many is inherently counterproductive. People should own one to two max. It keeps focus high and “alignment effort” low.

No one’s stopping you if you want to make a “Let’s improve our accessibility” goal that you use to share, learn, discuss, and reflect.

If only a few people own Live Goals, only a few people get heard. When everyone owns a goal, everyone has a dedicated venue to share their work.

Alignment requires buy-in, and buy-in happens when everyone has a hand in crafting their Live Goals. Consider a cascading approach where the manager/leader sets a top-level goal, and folks underneath create their own goals that support it.

Consider longer cadences like bi-weekly or monthly for team goals, and weekly cadence for individual goals. That means whenever it’s time to provide a team goal update, you’re guaranteed to have updates from supporting goals on tap.

To edit, archive, or delete a Live Goal, click on the goal and select the "..." menu to the right of the goal name.

Users will receive email, Slack, and Teams reminders according to their goal's update cadence. Updates can also be provided at any time by accessing the Live Goal and selecting "Post an update". Other team members will receive the update via email, Slack, and Teams.

When posting an update, enter the highlight or big takeaway as the Summary.

Select whether the status is "On track", "At risk", or "Off track" and provide an indication of the % complete.

Lastly, provide more details and context in the body. When the update is published, members of the team will receive the update by email or within the integrated Slack or Teams channel.

You can view a stream of Live Goal updates on the Goals page in the right-hand section. This list is ordered with the most recent updates on top, across all Live Goals. Click on a Live Goal to view its complete update history. Comment and react to goal updates, just like check-ins.