One-Step-Away Team Goals
Set your team's goal exactly one why-statement or one math operator away from a company goal.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 95%
Rather than cascading company goals through many intermediate layers until the lowest-level goals no longer add back up, LeMay argues every team goal should orbit the company goal at one level of remove — connected by a single 'why' statement or a single mathematical operator. This makes the goal instantly legible to leadership and gives the team leeway to make bold decisions.
Origin
LeMay credits the orbital 'center of gravity' visual to Christina Wodtke's book 'Radical Focus,' which contrasts multi-level OKR cascades with company goals as a gravitational center orbited one level out by team goals. LeMay operationalizes it as the first of his three impact-first steps.
Core principles
- 01A multi-level cascade (company > department > big team > small team > smaller team) produces goals that can't be summed back to the top
- 02The connection between a team goal and the company goal should be one 'why' statement or one mathematical operator
- 03A well-connected goal needs no defending — leadership 'gets it' without asking to see your deck
- 04A goal one step away can be a multiplier of a known value, or a named subset of the same revenue/growth number
How to run it
- 1
Start from the company's most-cared-about number
Identify what the business actually measures success by (topline revenue, a million new users, a profit target) rather than starting from your team's activities.
Pro tip For public companies, mine the last town hall slides, prospectus, or shareholder promises; for startups, ask whether investors want growth or profitability.
Watch out These top-level numbers exist somewhere but are easy to get disconnected from in day-to-day work — teams literally dig through old town-hall decks to find them.
- 2
Ask why your team exists at all
Force the question: why is the business investing in this team? The answer usually surfaces the causal link (e.g. multi-product users have higher lifetime value).
Pro tip An engineer or designer often surfaces the real impact link before the PM does — facilitate, don't monopolize, the conversation.
- 3
Express the goal as one operator or one why from the company goal
Convert the link into a concrete team goal: e.g. convert X single-product users to multi-product users, because multiplied by the known lifetime-value delta that yields Y revenue toward the company topline.
Pro tip Heuristic: there should be a single spreadsheet formula translating your goal up to the company goal.
Watch out If the tie to the company goal takes ten steps to explain, it's too far away and no one will understand what your team is even doing.
In the wild
LeMay worked with a traditional feature team at a fintech company that was used to being told what to build. When leadership handed them a topline revenue target and asked how they'd contribute, LeMay admits he was 'panicking' and asking bad questions — until he asked why the team existed. A team leader noted the customer lifetime value of a multi-product user was much higher than a single-product user, and that they had an exact number for it. That let them set a goal: convert a specific number of single-product users to multi-product users, multiplied by the known LTV delta, contributing a specific amount to topline revenue.
→ When the team shared the goal with leadership, they 'got it right away' — no need to justify value or show other OKRs — which gave the team leeway to make bolder decisions and ask for resources; the number then informed every decision for the rest of the year.
Common mistakes
Cascading goals into oblivion
Breaking a company goal down through five levels of sub-team goals means the lowest goals no longer add back up; asked how their lowest goals sum to the highest, teams 'look at me like I just asked them the most impossible question in the world.'
Copying the company goal verbatim
The opposite failure — making your team's goal identical to a $100M company revenue goal — is also wrong; the goal should be your specific one-step contribution to it, not the whole thing.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product teams being asked to justify their contribution to a topline business target for the first time.
Not ideal for
Teams whose company has no articulated top-level goal to anchor to, where the prior work is uncovering that goal.
From the transcript
“setting team goals close to company goals. No more than one step away from company goals. This idea comes from Christina Wood's book, Radical Focus”
“the company goal as a center of gravity and then every other team goal orbiting one level around it”
“one why statement and or one mathematical operator is usually the way I think about it”
“It's one step away. And when they went and shared that goal with company leadership, they got it right away”
“Don't let it get cascaded into oblivion”
From the episode
The one question that saves product careers
Matt LeMay