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.

Prompt Template 2: “Turn Product Vision into Measurable Design Goals”

Turn Product Vision into Measurable Design Goals

Context: You are collaborating with a PM to translate the product vision for [product direction or vertical] into actionable UX outcomes.

Specific Info: The strategy includes [growth targets], [platform migration], or [audience repositioning].

Intent: Produce a set of measurable design goals that anchor the team’s work around outcomes.

Response Format: Output as a list of 3–5 goals, each including: user behaviour, business correlation, and example success metric.

Ask for clarification if the product vision lacks user segmentation or behavioural assumptions.

Prompt Template 3: “Prioritise Product Goals Before Roadmapping”

Prioritise Product Goals Before Roadmapping

Context: You’re a UX designer preparing for a quarterly planning session.

Specific Info: The team has surfaced 8–10 competing objectives spanning acquisition, onboarding, NPS, and retention.

Intent: Generate a prioritisation map or matrix to facilitate trade-off discussions.

Response Format: Return a 2x2 impact/effort matrix with annotations describing each goal.

Request additional operational constraints if prioritisation is ambiguous or misaligned.

Prompt Template 4: “Draft OKRs from UX Research Synthesis”

Draft OKRs from UX Research Synthesis

Context: You’re synthesising findings from a recent diary study and usability test series.

Specific Info: Users showed inconsistencies in their [workflow], felt [emotional barrier], and dropped off around [specific step].

Intent: Draft clear, outcome-based OKRs that embed these insights into planning.

Response Format: Write 2–3 example Objectives with 2–3 Key Results each.

If insights contradict prior assumptions, highlight gaps before generating OKRs.

Prompt Template 5: “Facilitate Product Goal Discovery Session”

Facilitate Product Goal Discovery Session

Context: You are leading a cross-functional goal-setting workshop.

Specific Info: Participants include design, product, and engineering with different definitions of success.

Intent: Get a collaborative list of aligned goals that convert strategy into experience design direction.

Response Format: Suggest an agenda, interactive exercises, and output artifact format.

Recommend tactics to bridge disciplinary language gaps if team alignment feels fragmented.

Prompt Template 6: “Make Design Goals Visible in Your Team Rituals”

Make Design Goals Visible in Your Team Rituals

Context: You’re a design manager aiming to embed goal-focused thinking into daily standups and sprint reviews.

Specific Info: Teams often revert to task-based reporting instead of outcome-led retrospection.

Intent: Recommend specific rituals, dashboards, or comms strategies to keep product goals top-of-mind.

Response Format: Provide a list of 3–5 tactics with examples from mature teams.

Ask questions if the team’s planning cadence or tooling is unclear.

Prompt Template 7: “Align Team on What NOT to Prioritise”

Align Team on What NOT to Prioritise

Context: You’re defining product goals, but feature creep from stakeholders is diluting focus.

Specific Info: Several requests clash or distract from intended key outcomes.

Intent: Produce a “not-now” list to maintain strategic clarity.

Response Format: Return a mini product charter including: focus area, objectives, what’s in scope, and what’s explicitly out.

Invite input from stakeholders to ease defensiveness and build buy-in.

Prompt Template 8: “Map Goals to the User Journey”

Map Goals to the User Journey

Context: You’re reviewing the customer lifecycle to connect product goals to specific touchpoints.

Specific Info: The product has multiple journeys (e.g., prospect, trialling, active user).

Intent: Visualise how product goals intersect behaviours across the journey.

Response Format: Output a journey map table including: stages, goals, candidate metrics, and design implications.

Clarify if the journey lacks granularity or behavioural data coverage.

Prompt Template 9: “Generate Stakeholder Questions to Pressure-Test UX Goals”

Generate Stakeholder Questions to Pressure-Test UX Goals

Context: You’ve defined high-level UX goals, but need to validate them across business areas.

Specific Info: The team has alignment, but execs need confidence in user and market value.

Intent: Equip yourself with stakeholder-proof framing questions.

Response Format: A set of 5–7 strategic questions you can pose in reviews, framed per stakeholder type (e.g., sales, ops, marketing).

Ask for clarification if stakeholders are not clearly persona’d.

Prompt Template 10: “Translate Design Goals into Engineering Planning Inputs”

Translate Design Goals into Engineering Planning Inputs

Context: You’re handing off discovery work into sprint planning or epic shaping.

Specific Info: The product goals target [a behavioural metric], and solutions involve [cross-platform features].

Intent: Help engineering teams frame discovery outcomes into buildable scopes.

Response Format: Provide user story examples paired with success signal rationale and constraints.

Ask about planning milestones or tech limitations if not made explicit.

Recommended Tools

• Miro – for remote strategy mapping sessions
• FigJam – for collaborative goal setting diagrams
• Jira – for goal-to-task integration during planning
• Perplexity AI – for sourcing user sentiment or market trends to inform product direction

Learn More

• NNGroup: UX Research & Design Articles
• Interaction Design Foundation – Topics
• Google Design Sprint Kit