Pro Bundle: Project Objectives & Success Criteria

Objectives are the broad goals that we want to achieve with the project. They provide big-picture directions, so people understand both what we’re delivering and why we’re doing it.

Success criteria identify how you are going to measure that the project is successful once it’s completed. They are defined in the form of a measurable performance indicator (or KPI) that your team can track after launch (and often before, for comparison).

A project objective defines what the initiative is trying to achieve — it outlines the intended outcome, value, or change the program is expected to deliver. Objectives should be clear, strategic, and aligned with broader business goals.

A success criterion, on the other hand, specifies how you'll know the objective has been achieved. It’s a measurable indicator or condition that determines whether the objective was successfully met. In other words, objectives describe the “what” — success criteria define the “how well.”

The two work together to keep teams aligned and accountable throughout complex programs.

Throughout the project, the team will have to make difficult decisions to ensure that you deliver the expected return. These decisions will include things like adding or removing scope or weighing complexity (RE: automated solutions vs. more simplistic (cheaper) designs that rely on manual labor). They’re tradeoff decisions that will increase or decrease both the cost and the value sides of the equation.

Without shared, well-understood objectives, the team might:

• Constantly change the project scope, because it’s not clear what they need to achieve

• Struggle to decide which tasks are most important, prioritizing tasks that don’t add as much value

• Spend time (RE: money) on features that aren’t needed at all to achieve value.

I like to use the following formula:

What you need to deliver + who it’s for + why you’re doing it + critical guardrails for how it gets done

There are some tricks to doing that well, which are included in this PRO bundle.

There should be a clear and understandable relationship between the objective and these criteria. Re-read your objective statement and ask yourself, how will I know if we meet this goal?

This bundle has additional guidance and best practices, plus a library of 100+ common success criteria for Merchandising, Marketing, Sales, Supply Chain & Fulfillment, and User Adoption.

The following could be an example project objective for a luxury jewelry looking to implement personalized content and messaging for clients:

We must deliver cohesive, personalized experiences to meet rising client expectations and reinforce our reputation for intimacy and excellence in luxury.

With this project, we will deliver a CDP with real-time customer profile unification and a cross-channel journey builder. These two efforts will create a single view of the customer across all touchpoints and activate personalized messaging across major channels (email, web, mobile, in-store, call center).

For a luxury jewelry looking to implement personalized content and messaging for clients, success criteria could include:

• Increase the total customer lifetime value we can expect from our clients throughout their relationship by 15%

• Increase the conversion rate after receiving personalized content by 10%

• Improve the client retention rate by 5% for clients who receive personalized messaging