Product Goal Setting 🎯 Prompts

SUMMARY

Purpose: Product Goal Setting ensures the entire product team has a shared vision, strategic focus, and measurable outcome alignment across design, product, and engineering.

Design Thinking Phase: Define

Time: 60–90 min collaborative workshop + 1–2 hours synthesis

Difficulty: ⭐⭐

When to use:At project kickoff to align cross-functional teamsWhen product or business strategy shiftsDuring roadmap planning and prioritisation

What it is

Product Goal Setting is a strategic UX activity that brings clarity to what the team aims to achieve, why it matters, and how success will be measured. It aligns business goals, user needs, and implementation plans into tangible, prioritised goals that shape product direction and design decisions.

📺 Video by John Spencer. Embedded for educational reference.

Why it matters

Great UX isn't just about usability—it's about solving the right problems. Product Goal Setting connects user insights to business strategy, giving designers a compass for every screen, flow, and feature. It prevents solutions-first thinking and enables proactive trade-offs with confidence.

When to use

• At the start of a new product or major feature initiative
• To recalibrate team focus after organisational or customer shifts
• To support OKR planning or design roadmap discussions

Benefits

• Rich Insights: Helps uncover user needs that aren’t visible in metrics.
• Flexibility: Works across various project types and timelines.
• User Empathy: Deepens understanding of behaviours and motivations.

How to use it

1. Frame the session: Invite cross-functional team members (product, design, tech, marketing) and clarify the scope—what are we setting goals for?
2. Start with business and user context: Share known business goals, user research highlights, and current performance benchmarks.
3. Identify outcomes over outputs: Shift from features to intended impact. Ask: "What user behaviour or outcome are we trying to change?"
4. Define success signals: Translate desired outcomes into measurable goals (qualitative or quantitative).
5. Align priorities: Use dot voting or an effort–impact map to focus on the most valuable, actionable goals.
6. Synthesise and validate: Turn raw notes into a goal hierarchy or OKR framework, then share for team feedback and iteration.

Example Output

Project: Onboarding flow redesign for a B2B SaaS platform

Primary Product Goal: Increase team activation within 30 days (account has 2+ collaborators and initiated first workflow)

Supporting Design Goals:

• Simplify invite step to reduce drop-off for team-based onboarding
• Highlight collaborative features earlier in the flow
• Improve discoverability of workflow templates on the dashboard

Signals of Success: 20% increase in multi-seat accounts completing onboarding within 1 week

Common Pitfalls

• Vague objectives: Avoid goals like “make it cleaner” or “delight users”. Instead, anchor behaviour or value change.
• Tech-led prioritisation: Goals shouldn’t reinforce what’s easiest to build. Elevate user and business value equally.
• Skipping user input: Don’t assume stakeholder vision aligns with real needs—triangulate with current research.

10 Design-Ready AI Prompts for Product Goal Setting – UX/UI Edition

How These Prompts Work (C.S.I.R. Framework)

Each of the templates below follows the C.S.I.R. method — a proven structure for writing clear, effective prompts that get better results from ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, or any other LLM.

C.S.I.R. stands for:

• Context: Who you are and the UX situation you're working in
• Specific Info: Key design inputs, tasks, or constraints the AI should consider
• Intent: What you want the AI to help you achieve
• Response Format: The structure or format you want the AI to return (e.g. checklist, table, journey map)

Level up your career with smarter AI prompts.Get templates used by UX leaders — no guesswork, just results.Design faster, research smarter, and ship with confidence.First one’s free. Unlock all 10 by becoming a member.

Prompt Template 1: “Define Strategic UX Goals from User Interviews”

Define Strategic UX Goals from User Interviews

Context: You are a UX lead analysing insights from recent user interviews related to [a new feature or product pivot].

Specific Info: Themes include [pain point A], [motivation], and [adoption concern]. Stakeholders want to prioritise outcomes, not features.

Intent: Convert qualitative themes into 3–5 strategic UX goals linked to both business and user value.

Response Format: Present a table summarising the insight, corresponding UX goal, associated user behaviour, and a success metric.

If any insight theme feels too broad, ask clarifying questions. Then, suggest one additional user insight pattern to explore.