The cut: not everything is priority one · From Zero to Goals, lesson 7 of 17
The cut: not everything is priority one
Choose three goals out of seven candidates, and defend what you dropped.
The cut: not everything is priority one
The graveyard of goal systems is not bad goals. It is the board with eleven of them. Every goal you keep taxes every other goal, and a 12-person company has capacity for very few real bets per quarter.
Cutting is the part everyone avoids, because every candidate has a fan in the room. Brightside’s wishlist just met its capacity, and the two most popular ways to dodge the cut are both on the menu below.
Seven candidates, capacity for three
After cascading, Brightside’s combined Q2 wishlist, beyond the two standing commitments (3-day invoicing, zero churn), which stay because hygiene is cheap:
1 · Qualified leads 4→10 per month (Growth).
2 · Proposal win rate 20%→30% (Growth).
3 · Content engine: 0→8 published pieces per month (Growth, owner: Leo).
4 · Launch a partner referral program (new bet, has an excited fan).
5 · Rebuild internal project templates (Delivery quality-of-life).
The honest capacity read: the team can genuinely move THREE of these five. Dana has to cut two.
Which three survive?
Telling Leo
The board is cut: leads, win rate, content. The referral program: cut. The referral program was Leo’s idea, he has told two friendly clients it is coming, and Dana can already see his face.
Four ways to deliver the news are on her mind:
1 · Don’t make it a thing. The new board goes up; the referral idea just isn’t on it.
2 · “Parked, not killed: we revisit on 1 July, and it comes back if leads are at 8 a month by then.” Written on the board’s parking lane.
3 · “Officially it’s not a goal, but if you want to push it on the side, I won’t stop you.”
4 · Keep it on the board as a fifth, unscored, nice-to-have goal.
How does the referral program die (or not)?
What you drop defines the quarter more than what you keep
The cut is your strategy doing its quarterly job: the road you chose in lesson 1.3 forbids things, and this is where it forbids them out loud. Cut by the causal chain, never by fairness across people. A quarter is not a cake to slice evenly. The kept goals should reinforce each other; if two goals never touch, one of them is probably next quarter’s.
And give the cut ones a decent exit: a parking lot with a revisit date, written down. “Not now, reviewed 1 July” loses gracefully; a silent kill turns every future planning session into a lobbying war.
Make your own cut: on paper, today
List everything your team currently calls a goal. Count what you can genuinely move this quarter (be brutal). Name what you would cut, and write the parking-lot line for each: “not now, reviewed [date]”.
Saved in this browser only. Keep it on a free account and it stops depending on this one.
More on choosing what stays
All optional, and none of it is needed for the certificate. Each opens in a new tab, so your place in the lesson is kept.
- How to set team goals ↗Setting the three that survive rather than the seven that were proposed.5 min read
- Company goal examples for small teams ↗What a whole company board looks like when it is honestly only three lines long.4 min read