Business Goals
What are business goals?
Business goals are the high-level objectives a company wants to achieve, which product teams use to align their work and ensure they're creating value for both the business and customers. These goals—often presented at all-hands meetings or communicated by executive leadership—provide the foundation for product outcomes and help teams prioritize their discovery and delivery efforts.
Connecting product work to business goals ensures teams understand why they're building certain things and helps them make better decisions in their day-to-day work.
How do business goals relate to product work?
Business goals sit at the top of the hierarchy that guides product decisions. They're the broad organizational objectives that cascade down into more specific product outcomes, which teams then use to identify opportunities and develop solutions.
On an opportunity solution tree, business goals connect to product outcomes, which connect to opportunities, which connect to solutions. This structure helps teams see how their tactical work ladders up to strategic business objectives.
When teams map their opportunities and solutions to business goals using tools like opportunity solution trees, it creates clarity about what's well-defined and what isn't. It also enables more strategic conversations about prioritization with stakeholders, showing that decisions aren't just pragmatic and technical—they're connected to higher-level business strategy.
Why do teams need to regularly revisit business goals?
While everyone typically hears about high-level business goals at company all-hands meetings, these goals can easily fade into the background of day-to-day work. Teams benefit from regular reinforcement—quarterly reminders or check-ins with product and business leaders—to maintain clarity about how their work translates into development efforts.
This regular reconnection with business goals helps teams:
- Prioritize which opportunities are most likely to drive impact on what matters to the organization.
- Make better daily decisions by understanding the strategic context for their tactical choices.
- Stay aligned with product and business leaders on what success looks like and why certain work takes priority over other work.
When teams keep business goals visible and actively use them to inform their discovery work, they're more likely to deliver products that create both customer value and business impact.
Learn more:
- Shifting from Outputs to Outcomes: Why It Matters and How to Get Started
- Opportunity Solution Trees: Visualize Your Discovery to Stay Aligned and Drive Outcomes
Related terms:
- Business Outcome
- Outcome
- Product Outcome
- Opportunity Solution Tree
- Alignment
Last Updated: October 25, 2025