Whether you’re setting the goals for yourself and your school’s entrepreneurship center team, or you’re helping your student founders to set goals for their business, a framework for these metrics can be helpful. One of the most common of these is the S.M.A.R.T. goal-setting model, first popularized in the 1980’s, and one of the more recent is the F.A.S.T. framework. While both models can present issues if not utilized thoughtfully and flexibly, they also both offer the valuable opportunity to reflect on - and improve - goal setting and ultimately then make better progress.

S.M.A.R.T. Goals

Based on organizational performance research from the 1960’s, the S.M.A.R.T. acronym for easily understood and evaluated goal achievement was first introduced by consultant George Doran, in a Management Review article in 1981. According to Doran, managers sometimes struggle to determine and document goals and objectives for themselves and their teams, and when they do document goals, the list was often too broad and qualitative to have a real impact. To overcome this, he presented five  S.M.A.R.T. criteria for goal-setting:

• Specific. Doran described this as choosing a goal that targets a distinct area of the business for improvement. This criterion is also about clearly defining the details of what is to be accomplished. 
• Rather than a student founder vaguely setting a goal of getting “more customers”, challenge him or her to commit to accumulating a specific type of user that will have the greatest impact.
• Measurable. This element encourages gauging success using quantitative, or qualitative if need be, assessments. If no countable or describable metric can be identified, Doran suggested determining an “indicator of success” to know when the goal is achieved. 
• As Zach pointed out in Make Progress with Goals, student founders should commit to a number for their goals if at all possible. Ex: 10 trial users, 20 customer discovery interviews, 3 family and friend pitch practices, etc.
• Achievable (realistic). Originally the A in S.M.A.R.T. stood for “assignable”, recognizing the importance of a goal or objective having an owner who was responsible for its completion. At Techstars, we have utilized the more commonly recognized “achievable” for this letter. That being said, Zach Nies encourages startup teams to choose stretch goals, such that accomplishing 70%  is considered a success.) Another interpretation of this criterion is “action-oriented”. While focusing on concrete behaviors and processes is useful, an over-attention on action can risk reverting progress to activity. 
• This is where sandbagging and incremental progress can also become a risk if the goal is not set ambitiously enough.
• Relevant. Originally this element was defined as “realistic”, but regardless of the word used, it is all about focusing a goal on what could possibly be achieved with given time and resources constraints. Another important consideration, given the alternative definition of “relevant”, challenges the goal-setter to be sure that the goal supports and ultimately helps achieve the bigger picture, strategic mission of the team, or organization. 
• This is the area most helpful in avoiding activity over progress - make sure the student founder’s goals are directly linked, as Zach described, to Key Results and KPIs. This is also an opportunity to discuss with students the external limiters of their progress. Ex: Failing a final exam because the student chose to work on their startup is not an appropriate strategy.
• Time-limited or -related. This consideration is all about thoughtfully recognizing what can be accomplished between the date of goal-setting and progress evaluation. 
• This is a great segway to discussing with your student entrepreneurs how often they will schedule team meetings and how often you, as their Campus Director, will be involved.

As mentioned above, since the original publication, the S.M.A.R.T. goal framework has been modified and refined by countless management and organizational experts. In addition, several issues have arisen with these criteria - some of which are particularly applicable to early-stage, rapidly growing, startups and businesses that operate in more technology-based industries: Rigidity to some of the above criteria presents a challenge to the need for freedom, innovation, and autonomy, especially when teams, organizations, and industries can rapidly change. When individuals lack control over all variables (often the case with startups), committing to goals that meet the above criteria can also be problematic.

F.A.S.T. Goals

To address these and other issues and provide a goal-setting framework based on more recent organizational research, Donald Sull at MIT has proposed the F.A.S.T. model, described in the Sloan Management Review in 2018.

• Frequent discussions. This element is based on the recognition that the traditional annual cycle of performance review (and strong linkage to compensation and incentives) is insufficient and does not maximize an individual or team’s potential for meeting goals. As it relates to student startup goals, consider what is an effective cadence for checking progress. 
  • While the frequency of check-ins may be different for each individual student entrepreneurs, Campus Directors should encourage at least monthly or at minimum quarterly meetings.

• Ambitious in scope. Addressing the issue of achievable goals that hinder innovation and creativity, setting ambitious goals can encourage students to be more open to trial-and-error and experimentation. This idea is central to Zach’s recommended stretch goal. 
• If students are particularly reluctant to setting potentially unattainable goals, consider identifying one or three or five to be the stretch goal and allowing the remainder to be more moderate.
• Specific metric and milestone measurement. The one element maintained from the original S.M.A.R.T. goal description, Sull notes an added benefit of specific metrics and milestones is that these kinds of objective and keys results, “can be treated as hypotheses: ‘If we do this, then we will accomplish our goal.’ The more specific the hypotheses are, the easier it is to test them, determine which ones are (or aren’t) working, and make midcourse corrections.” 
• Challenge your student founders to define a specific goal and clearly document how and why it impacts key results. When reviewing progress, discuss whether or not this expected outcome was correlated, caused by, or unrelated.
• Transparent for everyone to see. Again, while sharing goals publicly may be intimidating to begin with, the benefits are clear: It creates some peer pressure among team members and between other teams and it helps other teams consider the most important goals they should be set for their businesses. Remind students, if it works for Google and Amazon, it might just work for their startup! 
• Publicly sharing goals can be accomplished physically in your space with a large whiteboard, or in a software system - if that system is open to all participants.