Yearly goals

Yearly goals focus our attention on the work now that will have the biggest impact in the medium-long term. Yearly goals are set at the start of each year by the leadership team at Spill but everyone can input on them by discussing them with their manager ahead of time.

For an example of a yearly goal, our goal for 2025 was to “take market share from EAPs outside of the tech and media industry”, and that was measured by signing up 200 companies outside tech and media.

Projects

All projects that are completed by writing code live on the product roadmap. Typically, for something to be considered a project, it should take one or more “person weeks” to complete.

Ideas for projects tend to come out of one of three types of work:

1. user research: talking to company admins or employees about their problems and goals
2. small experiments: testing a flow with real users
3. thinking or talking: reformulating or imagining how Spill could better help our customers

Who comes up with project ideas?

Usually, it’s the product lead coming up with the ideas through one of the routes above. The product lead then has to convince the engineering lead that it’s a worthwhile project. Generally, though, a project can happen if any one person in the business can convince another person (outside of their function) that the project should move ahead.

How can I run a small experiment?

Small experiments are one of the ways that we can get conviction for project ideas. They can give us early proof that a project idea is a good one and make it easier to convince somebody from a different function that it’s a project worth pursuing.

Anyone can run a small experiment. All you have to do is make a short pitch for it to your team, and you can take up to a couple of days to run it.

If you need to write code for your experiment, you’ll need to convince an engineer to work on it with you, and the total time spent should still be no more than 2 person days.

Specs and designs